unidentified species Archives

Winter is Coming…

Posted on November 29, 2016

Winter is indeed just around the corner. With winter comes the New Year and the bulk of the annual reports are due. It is very important that you start looking at your State and Federal reports right now to find inconsistencies.

Winter To-Do List

Search all pending records and make sure you close out all patients that are not in your care.

If your state has a state report, make sure you can access it and that it is working. It is found under “Quick Links”, “Reports” If you do not see a state report for your state, please send us a blank copy ASAP so we can get it into the system. We believe we have them all, but if we don’t we would appreciate your help.

Make sure mammals, birds and herps are where they belong in the report. Sometimes if a species is changed in the Cage Card it does not fully update, we can not find any reason why it does this, but we think it happens by not clicking update. It will change the species name but not the species info behind the scenes.

Identify unidentified species. It is very common to have several species that are not identified correctly. If someone just types is swallow instead of selecting Barn Swallow, then the database does not recognize that animal. The database is pretty smart, but not that smart. My hope is that this week we can create an easy way to fix the unidentified animals through settings. Until then, the easiest thing to do is search all 2016 records, Export Records, select the Common Name and all the Taxonomy and export. This will give you a list you can compare common names entered and the animals taxonomy. If it says unidentified in all the taxa, you know it is an unidentified animal. The Case # is the ID and you can go back into WRMD and fix the info.

Suggestions and Ideas

Throughout the year we get many new suggestions, ideas and possible fixes. We always look at these, filter through what can be done and can’t be done and put them on a priority list. I would like to invite our users to make any suggestions and ideas they would like to see in the New Year. We have many items on our lists, but we would like to see what is more urgent for our users. Please email me at [email protected]. I will do my best to reply quickly on if it is something will can do and also the status of that suggestion.

We are particularly interested in ideas for analytic and reports you would like to see more of. Feel free to repeat yourself if you have already sent me ideas in the past.

February WRMD Update

Posted on February 2, 2016

We have made it through the first month of the WRMD 3.0 update! What a month it was. Thank you everybody for your patience and we are sorry for any and all inconvenience the transition has caused. I know that reporting time is neigh upon us and we are the cause of some lateness due to trying to make sure everything matches up correctly.

Unidentified Species and Reporting

A few things to keep in mind while reporting is that in several cases the species are unidentified. It is critical that you choose from the drop down list provided. If you can not find the species you are looking for contact us, chances are it has an alternative name which can be found in wikipedia pretty easily. For example some was looking for Groundhog which was not in the database, being Groundhog’s day… I looked it up in wikipedia and saw that they are also known as a Woodchuck which was in the database. So, woodchuck could have been used instead. However, we are able to add the common name Groundhog to the species, so now you can use Woodchuck or Groundhog and both are the same. We will create a way in settings to look up your unidentified species, but as for now you can see that a species is unidentified by exporting everything from a list into excel. If you see a species_id number as 999999 it is an unidentified animal.

See the Example

Customization and Reporting

Every state has their own requirement and we work hard to make sure that at the least you are able to record the necessary information required for your reports. Some states like New York have many custom settings to record information that is required by the state. So, sometimes we have to work out some of the bugs that come along with customization before everything works smoothly.

Custom Fields

The same thing goes for Custom Fields. As many have now noticed you can only have 10 custom fields, anything beyond that will not allow for data to be recorded. We have worked with a few organizations to try and dwindle down their custom fields to a manageable level. Still, custom fields are a little more finicky because they have to format themselves in to everything else which is pre-formatted by WRMD and sometimes bugs occur. If you are in need of more custom fields, then please contact us so that we can help either dwindle down what you have or we will be able to do custom extensions for a charge. This will not launch until we are sure we have all the kinks worked out in WRMD 3.0. (Note: Custom fields in image are Sector and Aid Station)

WRMD Adding Back its Lost Features

It was really important to WRMD that we get the Heart of WRMD 3.0 working smoothly. In order to do this we did not move over all of the features that WRMD 2.0 had, such as WRMD Import and Necropsy among many other features. As, WRMD 3.0 is getting debugged and our customer service is slowing down, we can now focus on getting more of the WRMD 2.0 features into WRMD 3.0.

Necropsy

As of today the Necropsy extension will be available again. Thanks to some help from out users, it is beefed up substantially. Keep in mind this is designed for veterinarians, but can be used by any skilled Prosector.

Analytics

This month we will work on getting Analytics back on board as well. So, if you have a analytic that you would like to see in the analytics section that would be useful to all wildlife rehabilitators let us know and we will consider adding it in. Email us at [email protected] for suggestions.

Donations

Thanks to all that made donations in 2015!!!! If you have made donations in the year 2015 and need a donation receipt from us, please send me an email to the above email address with your name and address so I can send those out to you ASAP.