J-Bird User's Guide (Version 0.5.2)

Listing species (Life-lists, etc.)

Overview

J-Bird can generate lists of species that you've seen. It can generate life-lists as well as lists for specific regions and time periods. Lists that you generate are displayed on the screen. You can save them as web documents (HTML files) or as files of comma-separated values (CSV).

Lists can be customized. You can restrict lists to contain species seen by specified observers, in specified time periods, regions, and months of the year. Lists can be simple, containing only species names, or they can be tables in which columns contain different categories of observations. Columns can represent different observers, regions, localities, years, months, or individual dates. Here are some examples of tables that you can make: life-lists for everyone for whom ticks are stored in J-Bird, a table of all species seen in a year with separate columns for the months of the year, a table showing all species seen categorized by the regions in which they were seen. Tables have cells, and you can select what is displayed in cells. Choices include check boxes, first dates on which species were observed, most recent dates on which species were observed, or counts of the number of trips on which species were observed. Finally, you can display common names or scientific names, and family names may be included or not. In the future, once J-Bird supports the following feature, you'll also be able to have cells that contain counts of all individuals seen.

Instructions

Species list component To generate lists, choose the task "make species lists" in the task chooser at the upper left of the J-Bird window. Once J-Bird reconfigures itself, you'll choose the type of columns you want (or not), the type of cells that you want, the checklist of species to be be included (or not), and place restrictions on which ticks are included in the species lists, and then hit "GO!" to generate the list.

To restrict a query, select one of the tabs and make a selection. Date selections are flexible. You may specify a year, a year and month or a date. If you specify just a year as the beginning date, the date will be the first day of the year, and if you specify just a year as the ending date, the date will be the last day of the year. Similarly if you you specify just the year and month, the date will be either the first or last day of the month. You can restrict a search to a single year or to a single month of a year or to a single day by specifying the appropriate beginning date and selecting "End date same as begin date".

In the example to the right, all species that were observed prior to the year 2000 will be listed. Checkboxes will indicate regions in which species were observed.

When the list appears, you can use the File menu to save the list as either a web document (HTML) or as a file of comma-separated values (CSV).

You can modify the appearance of tables. Column widths can be changed by moving the mouse to the divider between two columns in the columns headings, pressing down the mouse button and dragging the divider to where you want it to be before releasing the mouse button. The width of the column to the left of the divider will be modified. The order of the columns can be modified by moving the mouse to the center of the heading of a column that you want to move and depressing the mouse button. While the mouse button is depressed, you can drag the column to where you want it to be. Unfortunately, changes to the order of columns are ignored when tables are saved as either HTML files or as CSV files.

List examples

Provided below are quick instructions for creating some lists that may be popular.

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Last updated 15 February 2005