all right well i think we'll go ahead and get started again here um hope everybody had a good lunch break um next talk we're going to hear from kristin mansfield she is our state wildlife veterinarian for the department of fish and wildlife and she's going to be talking to us about beaver health while in captivity so go ahead kristen and thank you well good afternoon everybody um sarah i just realized i didn't turn my vpn off i wonder if i should do that real quick right now um well let's give you just a second yeah i think it's okay yeah go ahead and try it it might kick you out uh let me just stop the sharing and then hold on [Music] okay am i back um yep i can hear you but we don't see oh it looks like your slides are coming don't quite see them yet okay okay yeah now yes i apologize everybody we've been told that um our vpn slows down audio and i forgot to turn that off before we got started so apologies for that um it's no problem so we're seeing your full power all right here we go right now excellent okay thank you uh so i'm kristen your full powerpoint window not just your slide um [Music] right the slideshow format no we're seeing it um where we can see your notes um you had it earlier set up so that we were only seeing the slide okay hold up here we can do that better or the same so far it's still the same that looks like it's switched over okay we're good we're good sorry about that thanks all right okay well the good news i don't think this will take a whole hour so we're not going to get too far behind from the little glitches here so my name is kristen mansfield i'm a veterinarian with the wildlife program in the washington department of fish and wildlife we have a part-time veterinarian named katie heyman and i need to give her credit for actually putting together the slideshow she did this for the training we did last summer so um i want to bring that up for two reasons one to give her credit and number two to kind of uh give a preemptive excuse if it's a little bit not smooth because it is her work but um she's out on maternity leave right now so i'm gonna try to cover this um we are gonna talk about health considerations and that's a rather a broad topic it's going to include individual beaver health at the individual level beaver health at the population level and we're going to touch a bit on ecosystem health and also human health as it relates to beavers so what does health mean it's more than no disease there are also uh mental and social aspects um for people and and beavers as well and i'd like to ask for input from the audience um if we're talking about an individual beaver what are some things that we would look at to let us know whether a beaver was healthy or not like we're looking at a beaver and and what tells you where that beaver seems healthy or not healthy anybody want to chime in so we'd be looking at things like is the beaver eating its food is it drinking is it acting overly scared or anxious is it interested in the environment or is it just really uninterested and depressed is it losing weight are his eyes bright and shiny and alert or are they kind of dull those are a few general things that anybody could look at and kind of get a feel for whether that beaver is healthy or not any other ideas or experiences out there kristin i'm not sure if you're able to see the chat but somebody threw out lethargy oh yes and i'm not able to see the chat so uh if you could let me know when those comments pop up i'd appreciate it and that was definitely a good one lethargy they just don't feel like moving they're just not doing much so these are some things to look at to know how an individual beaver might be doing oh um but one thing to also realize is that um oh hold on i lost something um an animal in captivity and under a lot of stress they could a couple things about stress in captivity one um stress can make uh health issues worse or it could prevent some health it can cause some health issues to develop and the other thing is it can mask some signs of illness you know being a prey animal animals generally have evolved some some better uh some behavior behavioral adaptations to to be able to hide signs of illness so that they're not broadcasting to all the predators out there hey i'm sick and not doing well it might be an easy lunch for you today so just a couple things related to the stress um you know it can mask thing you can mask illness and it can also cause or make illnesses worse and you know being that humans are probably in a beaver world considered a predator you don't want to stress them by being too observant and hovering too much um you know constantly being exposed to people peering in and its cages is gonna probably introduce some stress that you wouldn't want to be doing um so i saw that uh yesterday so i've had i haven't been participating these meetings but the comments have been popping up as i've been doing other work and i and i see that uh one question was was the same one as this third bullet here and it was how often should you observe and i don't really have a right answer for that but i'm curious what the discussion led to uh after that chat came up yesterday that comment in the chat um i'm curious what um what you guys talked about what did what did the group feel like was how often would be appropriate to observe the beavers anybody do you recall that sarah um it's funny i'm actually having a hard time recalling that conversation um we have a requirement for daily observation um so once a day at a minimum um and then beyond that it's it's i think if um if i can sort of speculate as to what the conversation was um beyond that i think it's really about um you know if the beaver seems to be exhibiting any any signs of um you know abnormal behavior then that might warrant additional observation but otherwise um you know just trying to minimize that human exposure is is probably the priority at that point but please other folks chime in if you remember better than i do yeah i would agree with what you just said sarah i i think a minimum of once a day is necessary to make sure that they seem to be doing okay and maybe if there's anything that gave you concern say if you did your check in the morning and you're a little worried about something you're not sure about something it would be completely appropriate to go back and check a second or maybe third time on that particular day so um again just to to recap things you should be looking for when you go peek in on the beavers hopefully just once a day is you know lethargy as someone stated in appetites loss of appetite not drinking evidence of diarrhea fever but you wouldn't really know if a beaver had a fever necessarily um unusual behavior uh crusty matted eyes unkempt for trauma anything like that so we talked a little bit about the stress already um we talked about how it can lead to major health issues including immunosuppression higher risk of disease infections uh loss of pregnancy if it's a pregnant female suppression of reproduction things like that and so you know we have to be honest that what we're doing to these beavers is pretty stressful being captured handled held in captivity um different hiding cover than they're used to doing different food and water than they're used to loud noises people dogs strange beavers so you know we are really introducing a lot of stress for these guys so we just need to assume that they are stressed um and this is very much kind of repetitive but i think it's worth repeating because it's important to to keep your eye out for signs such as change in activity level we mentioned lethargy but a stressed out fever might be hyperactive as well they might develop some pacing or ocd like behavior like gnawing and you know constantly rearranging their nest um circular swimming like kind of obsessively um stop eating so um what do we do about that um is the question hold on having some technical difficulties here [Music] you can look around and just see is there something you could do can you reduce noise can you reduce human contact can you do something maybe about auditory stimuli like is there a dog that's constantly barking or snuffling around can you provide some more hiding areas those are some thoughts that occur to me and maybe some experienced beaver relocators out there might have some other ideas as well and if so please chime in in the chat box and sarah i'm gonna rely on you let me know if anything comes up in the chat thank you i will okay so that's just kind of an introduction and an overview um if there's any questions or further discussion on that this would be a good time to to do that um otherwise we'll just keep on moving along [Music] so now we're going to talk a little bit about uh diseases and pathogens that could be moved when we move beavers from one location to another it's not just pathogens which a pathogen is a disease causing organism that we're concerned about but it's also [Music] other aquatic pathogens uh pathogens that might affect uh fish or amphibians or um you know things like ronavirus and frogs and then all the different fish viruses out there and then kitrid fungus which as many of you know many of you know is has had a devastating effect on on many of our frog species um so these are some that we know about but there's other pathogens out there that we don't know about or that have not even emerged yet and i think this recent covet experience is a really good example of we really you know we can manage and prepare for everything we do know about but what's going to end up biting you in the rear is is most likely the things that you never thought to think about and prepare for um or that we did that hadn't emerged yet that haven't even um you know mutated or evolved or shown up in this ecosystem yet so both path and the other thing is in addition to pathogens is we have aquatic invasive species and these are things like um noxious weeds that could clog waterways things like the mud snails new zealand mud snails and things like that that maybe we don't necessarily think about when removing beavers but we could have these things attached to the beaver outside of the beaver on its fur and introduce aquatic invasive species and pathogens into new watersheds and so um you could this could be so severe that you would actually negate the positive benefits of of what the beavers might do for the ecosystem if you're introducing damaging pathogens or invasive species into new areas unfortunately we don't know everything um there is to know about the actual true risks of moving pathogens and aquatic invasive species soon on watersheds there just hasn't been enough research but there has been some work for example that did show other aquatic mammals um specifically river otters that have been shown to be able to move specific fish pathogens to new water bodies so i mean it does stand a reason that a beaver could as well um but unfortunately we just don't have we don't have those answers we don't have the research and so we're kind of forced to adopt a precautionary principle to prevent you know what we don't know about yet and so that is the main reason why we have our restrictions on trying to limit the distance that beavers are relocated and try to minimize moving them from one major watershed to another next is we're just going to talk about a couple specific ones that i mentioned um we're focusing uh on the aquatic ones but you know certainly we could be moving pathogens around that could affect beavers as well and these could impact the survival of beavers in the recipient watershed potentially so just a few more details about kitrid fungus this is the one that affects amphibians and frogs in particular over 200 species of frogs are susceptible and there have been several species of frogs that have become extinct due to this fungus it infects their skin and in frogs the skin is important for respiration and osmoregulation and thermoregulation and i mean not only have there been catastrophic population declines but several species have gone extinct because of this pathogen and we don't know it does this fungus does develop spores can they survive on beaver we really don't know but again this is why we employ the precautionary principle [Music] we do know that um the fungus that causes kitrid is present in washington this map is from a comprehensive database maintained by the u.s forest service note though that these are only reports of positive detections um and to date we don't really have a complete statewide survey for this pathogen to know where it does and does not occur these are just positive detections we can't really say that because a watershed is showing up on this map that it doesn't have the pathogen present already it's just that it hasn't been looked for yet most likely but based on what we know in idaho and oregon we assume that it is endemic and widespread as it is in other states um so again that's why we you know you could argue what's there anyway but we prefer to be more precautionary and just say that caution should be taken when moving beavers especially from known sites um to reduce the risk of introducing it to an area also the time of year is significant um the metamorphs of both frogs and salamanders so the little tadpoles and the little salamanders are most susceptible to this fungus than adults are so you know one potential risk mitigation action would be um if you were to move beavers during a different uh during you know during the time of year when these metamorph life stages aren't around perhaps that's something that would minimize the risk a bit but you know we're just kind of um using our best information uh making these statements we don't really have the data to say for sure whether that would be whether that would significantly mitigate the risk or not another aquatic pathogen is rhona viruses they have the potential to have a huge impact on populations to date in washington we haven't had any mortality events that we've attributed to run a virus but this has happened in other states it is a very very hardy virus and it can survive for many days in the environment um there's no treatment for it so you know once this gets into a population of amphibians um and fish and some reptiles you really can't do much about it it's like any wildlife disease and i you know wildlife disease is what i it's what i do and you know there's just really really really very few instances of any way to treat it or manage it once it enters a wildlife population we just don't have the tools available that we do for domestic animals and humans and so really our only tool is prevention so we really need to do all we can to prevent moving these pathogens around [Music] and then there's fifth path fish pathogens and we're especially concerned here in washington with the salmonids some of these diseases are endemic here um uh but what what's really of concern is is kind of the same thing i mentioned earlier it's the ones that we don't know about yet or that uh we know they exist in other populations but we don't think they're in washington yet for example whirling disease that's caused by protozoan so we need to be diligent and conservative and how and where we move beavers for this reason to help to help prevent the movement of these pathogens around the state and it is um correctly pointed out that um the the agency uh dfw the tribes the u.s fish wildlife service um move uh some islands around a lot i mean they grow them in hatcheries and then they you know release them and so obviously this happens but do you realize that when this is done it's done in accordance with the co-managers semana disease control policy and so under this policy there is disease and pathogen testing of these fish and they're not moved outside of fish health management zones without permission from all the co-managers so while there is inherent risk in the way that we manage salmanis in particular here in washington there are um protocols and processes in place that help us minimize those actions and we don't have a formal uh arrangement like that with beavers um was there a chat or a comment or not i thought i heard one um i haven't seen anything come in um okay [Music] so um just kind of kind of a recap um some things that we can do with the knowledge that we do have is if you're trapping in an area if you're trapping beavers on the area where we know uh bd which is the fungus that causes chytrid disease and frogs it is you know it is absolutely um critical that that those not be moved to another watershed where we don't believe that we have that pathogen and again our knowledge is fairly limited unfortunately but um you just wouldn't want to take a beaver from a known uh bd positive watershed and move it somewhere else if at all possible um that's why we try to you know we try really hard to to emphasize that if possible um you know if if if watershed if moving through watersheds is going to happen then it's better to take it from one where we don't think we have it and move that beaver from that watershed to a place where we do have it so you're not introducing like you know to a new place rather than opposite if you know you have it in that watershed you don't want to take a beaver and move it to watershed where we don't think we have it um can give us a call if you have a question i can't say that i would have the answer at the top of my head or on my fingertips but i could help run that down um we do have some questions as alluded to can beavers even carry it would it survive a whole lot of other questions that unfortunately we just do not have the answers to right now so the next class of pathogens are talking about is what we're going to call zoonotic and these are pathogens that can infect humans and animals and as is the case with many zoonotic pathogens very frequently the animal that carries that pathogen doesn't show any signs of it but it can still transmit the pathogen to a human and so that's why we recommend to always wear ppe when you're handling any kind of wildlife including beavers and so that would be gloves and outer garments that can be washed a mask if you have one uh the zoonotic pathogens that we know beavers carry and that people can get are tularemia giardia leptospirosis ursiniosis and rabies we've not diagnosed rabies oh wait there's more rabies later okay so let's move on okay so now we're just going to touch on some specifics about the the diseases i just went over to the rhythm is also caused called a rabbit fever we've diagnosed it in washington in several beavers um they're usually just found dead in the wild we've diagnosed it in snowshoe hares and i think muskrats one of those aquatic um rodents um the symptoms which you're not really these are symptoms for humans you're not going to be able to tell this necessarily in a beef or and again a beaver you know it might not show these might not even show that it's sick it might just end up dead one day um but in people it's a high temperature headache body aches nausea sweating pretty much flu like symptoms so pretty vague giardia is a parasite and it's so common in beavers that it's also called beaver fever so it causes severe diarrhea in washington it's fairly common in washington this is a parasite that beavers can carry with no problem whatsoever but they're releasing these uh giardia system to the water and so that's actually how people get it as they drink contaminated water they don't typically get it directly from beavers but this is a disease you need to be aware of if you're cleaning out the feces and it also is relevant to how you manage the waste water when you clean out um their their facilities they do produce cysts that'll allow them to survive in the environment for a long period of time and are relatively tolerant to most disinfectants so this is where ppe is super important make sure you're wearing gloves wash your hands don't smoke drink or eat while you're hosing out the beaver pen be sure and wash your hands afterwards um keep the waste water away from pets and away from uh you know don't let it contaminate any drinking water um ideally don't let it get into a uh you know another water body nearby even though it's probably present in most watersheds it just seems the most responsible thing is not to not to risk further contaminating other water bodies with it laptosporosis is um [Music] there's several strains of this um and this one is spread by rodent urine including uh beaver urine and most people get exposed from contaminated water from swimming in it or getting into cuts or mucous membranes it's not super common in washington but it's out there and if you guys are handling beavers or working in water where beavers live you're at a higher risk for getting this than the average citizen is so um here are the clinical signs and again this is a situation where you want to be really diligent with using your ppe and managing the water associated with your with your beaver facility your stenosis is a bacterial disease um it's pretty i mean it's it's kind of everywhere it's not really beaver specific and i we put it in here just because we did have one beaver that we're aware of that died of this um we suspected it would be tuloremia because it was a you know it was found dead um in a pin as i recall we assumed it was going to be tularemia but it actually ended up being your stenosis so you know a point here is you really can't tell what pathogen you're dealing with necessarily until you get it tested at a lab so if you look at this it's pretty darn similar to tooth remia and maybe even giardia so let's assume that every beaver could be fitted with some kind of nasty bug that could affect you and follow the appropriate precautions i said come back to rabies beavers can carry rabies um they have certainly been diagnosed with rabies uh in other parts of the country in particular in areas where rabies is very prevalent in terrestrial species such as raccoons so along the atlantic seaboard there's a really bad rabies problem in raccoons and in those areas there's a lot of spill over into all kinds of other species so beavers are susceptible but here in washington bats are a main vector of rabies and we don't really see this disease much at all in washington except for in bats but it's theoretically possible so since rabies is 100 deadly if you get it and don't get treated um you need to take particular notice if a beaver acts extremely aggressive or erratically and if you were to be bitten by this a beaver behaving this way then you would you'd want to get to your doctor and contact your health department as soon as possible and again it's not that common i mean it's not that likely to happen in washington but given the potential consequences we just wanted to make sure that we touched on it during this presentation so some take homes regarding um the zoonotic diseases those diseases that beavers could pass to you are as we mentioned all the um the signs are really similar for all these diseases and the beaver could be carrying these pathogens and pass it on to you and it could still look just fine so it's up to you to assume that beaver is sick and always wear proper protective personal protective equipment and just use some good common sense and good hygiene practices when you're working around them if you develop any of these kind of vague flu-like signs after you've been handling beavers and go to the doctor it's a really good idea to let them know that you have been handling beavers because if you're handling wildlife that puts you in a really unique specialized category of people your risk of getting these diseases is a lot higher than the average person just because you're in close contact with this wild species and i do have we do have a like a wallet card that we hand out i think we did this last year that you can take and show to your doctor if you do happen to develop these signs and what it is is it's a list of some of the more common zoonotic diseases that wildlife workers are at a much higher risk for but the doctors might not necessarily it might not be the first thing that comes to their mind they might just say go you got the flu go home for 48 hours and call me if you're not better but this just kind of alerts them that you would be in a special category and that they might want to consider some of these other diseases that wouldn't necessarily occur to them right off the bat so sarah maybe we can send them that pdf as part of the educational materials at some point yeah yeah i'll send that to you guys um so we talked a little bit about ais aquatic invasive species at the beginning of this talk um [Music] there's several one that we're really concerned about is the new zealand mud snail they're highly invasive they can survive for weeks out of the water they can reproduce with just one single snail and they out compete and displace native uh food for fish and they um they develop really high densities and can cause um a lot of damage to some of our uh water infrastructure some of our irrigation and water supply and dams and things like that by blocking intake areas and things like that and these guys could survive on a beaver pelt i don't think we have diagnosed it or detected in washington i could be wrong um but i do oh wait there's another slide hold up maybe we do okay yeah we do we do have it i don't know if they've been eradicated in these areas where they're showing up on this map i kind of doubt it let me read what what katie has written here so this map shows where new zealand mud snails have been detected and confirmed in washington dots are where the detections are entire watersheds are highlighted if an area within it is positive note that there has been pretty good statewide surveillance for new zealand mud snails so we can be fairly certain that areas that are negative are negative um and this is in contrast with the kitrid fungus map where we really haven't done systematic surveillance but it sounds like here in washington they have for this snail given the risk of even a single new zealand mud snail resulting in introduction into a new area we must be cautious when moving beavers from a known positive watershed and it says there is an ongoing discussion with the within the aquatic invasive species t but dfw about how far upstream and downstream of a detection we need to restrict movement of beaver um the ais team suggests we don't move beaver from a known positive watershed to a negative one um and you know we don't know if that's feasible and it requires more discussion and all that but it's kind of the same deal with the kitrid fungus you know if you can at all avoid moving an animal from one of these known positive watersheds to another one it really is incumbent upon us to to avoid doing that and so here's our recommendations i don't know if they're sarah if we've formalized these any more than just what we have here you know making a recommendation and a request um i don't think we have but this is what we would ask that people do is to avoid moving a beaver from a known positive watershed to a negative one and um let us know when you will be trapping in a known positive watershed um always go from from clean to dirty not dirty clean if you are going to move something like go from you know oh i think this is backwards it should be go from low risk to high risk not not not high risk to low you know you want to you want to better to put something clean in the dirty area then take something dirty and put in a clean area um if you have any questions or want to discuss you know contact our regional staff or me or katie and again i don't know that we have a really easy answer but we can maybe discuss some things and um i think and again sarah i don't know if we're asking people to do this but when we move when people move beavers out of known positive watersheds it would be nice if we knew um i don't know that we'd be able to do much about it but in case something you know does erupt in in a new watershed it might be good to have that information yeah i'll just jump yeah i'll just right here real quick um we do have a requirement you have a requirement explaining to me speakers from one motorcycle on one motorcycle you need to meet with appropriate dfw i don't hear an echo okay good um i'll try to tune it out so um the idea is that when you when you meet at the beginning of the season before you begin any captures to do um that meeting with your your district staff that's a good time to let them know if you are anticipating any cross watershed relocations and then you can have that conversation with them and then also loop in either kitty or kristin the veterinarian and then they can provide recommendations for whether um you know quarantine might be appropriate or or other options or if it comes down to it they can say you know no we're not going to allow relocations in in this from this watershed to that watershed so you can get approval for it but you do need to have that conversation and get approval otherwise relocations are just limited to within a watershed thank you sarah sorry i had forgotten all that but yeah i remember now no problem so um aquatic invasive species and pathogens moving forward um these are some things that is our wish list we wish that we really knew if beavers were at risk um but we need money to do that we need to swallow by the beavers we need to send in tests we need to um you know there's some some research ideas here but um until we know more we just need to be following the precautionary principle as sarah very nicely just uh uh encapsulated for us so mortalities is next given that we have had some diagnoses of some potentially significant diseases in beavers that were part of the beaver relocation program um we do want to make an effort to test any mortalities that you guys might have and and let me let me uh clarify that and say um if the cause of death is not obvious so for example if some bad accident happened and um you know a cinder block fell on its head or it drowned or it got trapped trying to escape and died you know if it's obvious what killed it if it was something traumatic like that we don't necessarily need to send that in to find out what the cause of death is but if you just find it dead in the pin or the or the tank one day and especially if it was ill before that then we would consider that a pretty high priority to get submitted to the laboratory to find out what it died of and if it was one of these diseases that we talked about that could potentially affect humans we would want that information so that you could be on the on the alert and be mon you know maybe pay a little more attention to your health in the following weeks and maybe alert your doctor and that sort of thing so um do you let us know if you have a mortality where cause of death is not known it may take a while if it does take a while to reach us i mean i try to be very responsive and get back you know within the same day when i can when i get these sort of notifications but sometimes that doesn't happen um if you can't reach us right away um the ideal thing for a freshly dead beaver is to uh chill it down with ice packs or in ice water um you know to kind to to chill down the carcass so to slow down decomposition uh and then to overnight ship it to arrive at a lab less than 48 hours of death if logistically it's not possible to get it to the lab within 48 hours of death the next best thing is to freeze it and then we can kind of take our time and figure out how best to do that and that might involve say one of our agency staff coming by to get it or or or something like that um but you'll want to um first put put gloves on a mask if you have it you want to double bag it in a big garbage bag plastic bag if at all possible these guys are so fat and well insulated that internal decomposition occurs pretty quickly and you know the more decomposition there is the harder it is to figure out what killed that killed that animal and so something if you're able to do it with a fresh dead one is double bag it in plastic and then like dunk it in ice water or just do whatever you can to chill it out or if you just have a spare freezer put in the freezer um you know those are some kind of general guidelines but again try to contact us asap and we can kind of walk you through it on a case-by-case basis depending on those particular circumstances and we will pay for the lab work and we will pay for the shipping so just let us know if you get one of these situations so euthanasia hopefully you guys won't ever be in a position to deal with this but it's possible you will um so what is euthanasia it's it's identified as the painless stress-free humane killing of an animal and it is warranted in cases of extreme trauma illness or other situations when the beaver may not be released in a healthy condition that support that has a good chance of it surviving um so ideally you guys uh would have a relationship with a local veterinarian who would be willing to euthanize an animal for you if it needed to be euthanized if it was very sick or injured um some vets will do this for free just kind of as their community service and helping out wildlife other vets will want to charge a normal routine euthanasia fee if that becomes an issue and the only way to get an animal euthanized is to pay a vet to do it let us know we can probably find a way to pay the vet but hopefully they would do it for free vets have to follow the avma guidelines american american veterinary medical association guidelines on euthanasia most i mean they all do or else they'd be in trouble um and when this happens do let us know as soon as possible me or katie um and want to talk to you about it and see if it's the case that we might want to submit to the lab as we just discussed earlier [Music] you know um i we have three slides here on a condition called capture myopathy and talking to katie and talking to others um i believe there's a paper maybe two that attributed a death of um some beavers that were trapped to capture myopathy but looking at those papers i didn't really find any evidence that they uh really got a true diagnosis that this is what killed the animals in those particular studies and this is a disease that you really need a lab diagnosis um if an animal dies during capture it's not automatically capture myopathy myopathy is a very specific condition where the muscles are damaged and the animal has a high acid level in its blood a high buildup of lactic acid um you know as a result of those papers i try to look around and see if there's any evidence that you know the capture mortality was actually captured myopathy i didn't find any i did some research to see if capture mobility had been reported in beavers i never did find any evidence at all um so i'm not really convinced it's an issue with beavers um and so you know but but you know if if you have one that dies during the capture process let's send it in i mean contact us just like you would if you had a sick one that died um and we'll figure out whether it died of capture myopathy but i really don't think it's an issue with beavers at least i can't find any evidence at all i mean yeah beaver died while it was being trapped but why did it die maybe it got too hot maybe it got too cold maybe i mean who knows um so i'm just going to skip through these because it's real specific about this particular disease um um and we can discuss it more if you want to but i really just don't think it's quite an issue in beavers and um i'm just gonna skip it unless somebody wants to talk about some more and i'd be happy to so we've had some discussion about quarantine during the development of this program the definition is isolation for a period of time and i think with covid we're all becoming more and more familiar with all these various disease control terms usually a quarantine is about two weeks because that um most diseases if they're going to develop they're going to develop within about a two week period that's a real generalization um i think i think sarah we ultimately decided we're not going to require strict quarantine isn't that correct yeah that's correct we're not requiring quarantine but um if if folks are doing those cross watershed movements then it may be a requirement in those cases exactly yeah so i remember in the discussions a couple years ago we had back and forth as to whether we really should require strictly you know quarantine for a while or not and kind of weighing the pros and cons and um [Music] you know like we like uh sarah decided we did decide we won't require strict quarantine um i guess in lieu of that i would um well let me just read what katie says um so so why would you why would you do quarantine to begin with and we kind of all know that um excuse me it's to reduce the risk of exposing animals to pathogens that may come in on a new animal and it has the added benefit of potentially reducing stress on the new animal you know because introduction to strange animals even even the same species can be stressful to an animal and in quarantine you have an opportunity to monitor and watch the new arrival for signs of disease and excessive stress and that sort of thing um if it's not a hundred percent achievable to do that and it's not strictly required either there's some things just some to think about where you can achieve a few of the same benefits that quarantine might do for example if you have you know um well i guess you know i guess i guess it just underscores the importance of keeping a close eye on the on the new arrivals for the first few days and see if they exhibit any signs of illness or sickness and if they do and if you have the ability to do that you might want to try to separate those if your facility allows just to prevent the potential spread to other behaviors you might have in your facility so probably more important or just as important as quarantine is biosecurity biosecurity refers to the actions that are done to keep diseases and pathogens away from other animals or property or environments or humans they can be structural so these would be actions done in the kind of in the physical design and maintenance of the pins and equipment um you know like separating new arrivals for a few days from the ones you have in existence for example um not having dirty water go through all the pins you know where it might carry pathogens to other pins or you know pools there can also be procedural categories of biosecurity and so these would be just like your practices your sops your procedures your policies that are in place um [Music] so you know ppe i think would be part of that um you know cleaning out the facilities um uh maybe a policy to separate sick animals that sort of thing um it could include so just some specific things about um or one aspect of biosecurity are disinfectants like disinfecting an area um it is good to disinfect the facilities in between new beavers but be aware that many of the available disinfectants are toxic to aquatic life to fish in particular so you really need to read those labels um [Music] excuse me um there are some good ones that can be used in aquatic environments uh virgon aquatic is one of them that's approved by epa for use in aquaculture for example but the the key is you really need to read the labels on those and make sure that they are okay for aquatic um conditions and you need to be sure to really follow those instructions uh to the teeth so good good uh you know quarantine or or you know the best approximation we can accomplish of quarantine and biosecurity practices are really how we're going to stop the movement of ais and pathogens with beaver and it also will help us ensure that the beaver that we move to remain healthy [Music] i think this is my wait hold on no it looks like we got some slides out of order i'm sorry do you want to talk a little bit more about quarantine um yeah this should be moved i think we talked about this already is there any new stuff here yeah i think we're good here okay so i do believe that was my last slide um this is the contact information for katie um we we hope she'll be able to come back and be the main beaver um contact for veterinary stuff but we're not quite she is on maternity leave now and we're not quite sure we're gonna funding for her to continue to be the beaver uh vet um but her contact information is there and so is mine and you guys can contact us anytime we have any questions or concerns and we'd be happy to try to help out any questions or comments popping up thank you kristen that was great i think we've got um about seven minutes for questions if folks have any any thoughts to share um one thing i'll mention speaking of the pathogen transmission and christina was talking about how how little we know on that topic um we have been working with with katie heyman and so i apologize chris and i haven't kept you completely up to date on this to set up a research project with wsu i talked about this a little bit yesterday for those of you who remember so half of the project is is going to be looking at the use of edna to monitor beaver presence or occupancy and then we'll also be using edna to to look at whether beavers might be serving as um as fomites for pathogen transmission and so i don't think we quite have time to to really get into it now but once we have our open discussion period later this afternoon at three we've got jonah and some other folks on the call who can probably hopefully would be willing to talk to us a little bit um about that project if folks are interested to hear more about that um i see a couple of comments coming in here's one um there have been a few references to temperature sensitivity of beavers can you go into that in a little bit more detail christian do you have any any more information on temperature sensitivity i am sorry i do not have specific information on temperature sensitivity for beavers it's something i could look up and i'm sure there are experts out there who do um i would say that um just given their insulation and their heavy coats and and all that that that heat excessive heat i think would be a problem for them and so i would take a lot of or do all i could to keep them from getting overheated which you guys probably already know yeah that's great we talked about that a little bit during the the trapping session too and it's really just a concern that you always need to keep in mind with any wildlife species that you have in a trap in particular because they're not able to move themselves to thermoregulate on their own and so we have to be responsible for that there's another question here um i think the beaver relocation into different watersheds will trigger some obvious discussion but i think not forgetting equipment may serve as vectors as well yes thank you that is a super great point traps and even your waders um and and the boots and whatever you're using definitely that's a super good point they could definitely be fomites um yeah particularly something like kitchen fungus i think they've demonstrated that that has been transmitted through the use of equipment that wasn't cleaned properly yep yeah comet came in boot brushes so um yeah definitely whatever techniques you can you can employ to try to reduce that transmission is is worthwhile because those amphibian populations have really suffered from some of that jonah made a comment he's happy to talk more about the edna project so we'll plan on doing that um later this afternoon that's great any other questions for kristin then [Music] okay thanks everybody great thank you very much kristen we appreciate it are you um are you available at three in case other questions come up or are you um yeah and for the day oh actually no i have to pick up my daughter i'm sorry um for as long as i can but i have to take a couple hours off this afternoon okay that's great if anything comes up that we can't answer we'll we'll pass it on to you and get a response to them later so that sounds good okay all right thank you very much kristin all right thanks all right so um we're gonna move into talking about annual reporting now um i'm gonna tag team this with bill and i don't think he's quite on yet but hopefully he'll be joining us soon great hey bill um so i'll start us off kind of talking about post release monitoring and um the types of information we're going to be asking for on the annual report and then bill will jump in to talk about the new electronic data collection forms that we've developed to try to make some of that reporting a little bit easier for folks so let me try to get my screen up here all right let's see okay hopefully that's working for everybody um so i'll start off talking about um post release monitoring it's really pretty straightforward we're we're not asking for a lot of detailed information we just want to make sure that after beavers are released at a site that there is some some follow-up visits to the site to look for sign of beaver presence or activity there um and so this is this is really the the information that we're looking for we're asking people to survey 2000 feet upstream and 2000 feet downstream so you'll recognize that distance from the release site assessment form also i'm trying to kind of keep that sort of standardized survey area for for surveying occupancy and then we're going to ask for whether you see actual beaver individuals whether you see dams or dens or lodges or forage caches um and with those things we want to know if you do see them how many do you see both upstream and downstream and then we also have another set of um sign that we're looking for where we don't want you to have to count the number of tracks or scats that you see but we just want to know if you do see any um so that's tracks any fresh chewings or cuttings scat scent mounds or or other signs so if you if you see it or you don't see it that's what we're asking for and julie went through in her presentation what some of these things look like but if you have questions we can certainly talk more about that too so we ask for monitoring three times after each release and i talked about the the release period as a default is that may through october season so for releases that occur during may through october monitoring needs to happen one month after the release also once in the fall or before the winter following the release and then once the following spring to to see if there's any overwinter survival at the site so we don't have really specific dates and in some cases if you have a release late in the season kind of getting that one month after the release and once in the fall they can end up kind of close to each other but the idea is that we want to see relatively soon after a release if they're still there once before the winter and then once after the winter if you are doing releases during that off season period from that november through april period then the monitoring gets shifted a little bit so we'll look at it one month after the release once in the spring following the release and then once the following fall so three monitoring sessions within a year after each release event we definitely encourage additional monitoring if your project is able to do that you know what we're asking for we really see is kind of a minimal amount of effort to see how these beavers are doing at those release sites but other projects have talked about using motion cameras to survey those sites and have gotten some some really good information about both beavers and predators and you know potentially you could even document human activity and other things like that for motion cameras so those can be really useful also pit tags if you do have pitag arrays in the areas where you're working that can read those tags and that can be a really great tool for getting some good movement location on those animals and you can pick up dispersers in addition to the beavers who are establishing and sticking around the site where you've released them you're certainly welcome to do more frequent surveys whatever your your project has capacity for it's it's really good information to know how those beavers are doing after we release them um and then we've mentioned a few times this collaboration project with washington state university that we'll talk about a little bit more this afternoon but we will be doing some post release monitoring through that project too and are hoping to partner with with some of the beaver relocators on that so all of this is optional we encourage you to do it but the only requirement is those three site visits to look for sign so when it comes to the annual report we are asking for a fair amount of documentation right now mostly because we're in this pilot phase of the program and we really want to get a good amount of information to help kind of develop the program and see how things are going during this pilot phase so we can decide how how we need to adjust or change the program moving forward so it's really helpful for us to have have this information and we appreciate you sharing it with us so julie talked about the release site suitability assessment form for surveying potential release sites also the landowner attestation form for the landowner to acknowledge that they are asking to receive beavers at their site we also talked about the beaver handling form that logs capture events and release events and then any mortalities if you do happen to have or document any mortalities also we've talked about the daily observation log while beepers are in captivity to keep track of of how they're doing making sure that they're eating every day and that sort of thing um and then we just talked about post release monitoring so these are all of the things um that will be included in your annual report packet at the end of the season so the annual report is due by november 20th so like i said that relocation period of may through october ends and then you've got about three weeks to kind of finish getting your information together and submit it if you are doing relocations outside of that standard period then we also need an annual report for any november through march activities and that will be due by april 20th at the end of that period and then um if well since post release monitoring can occurs you know a fair amount of time after releases occur some of that will happen after your annual report due date and so monitoring report is due 20 days after monitoring is completed so it's a little bit um a few different levels of reporting here and so we appreciate your your sort of understanding of that but um we just want to make sure that we're getting that information in a relatively timely manner so that we can use it during this this pilot phase of the program to see how things are going all the reports need to be submitted on the dfw provided forms so i'm going to walk you through the paper forms briefly you've already seen most of those and then bill's going to walk you through the electronic survey 123 forms this year we are going to accept reports in either format so you have a choice of whatever is is your preference we would certainly prefer that you use the survey123 forms but we're going to be flexible with that this year the exception is the daily observation log if your project already has a form that you're using for that you may continue to use that form but we ask that you're recording some of the similar information that that we have on the the dfw daily observation log form you can submit your paper forms to this email address here and then the survey went to three forms when you submit those it automatically goes into the cloud so bill will talk more about that since most of you are operating as a group project rather than as an individual we do accept group annual reports so if you choose to submit your annual report as a group we ask that you indicate that on your permit application and provide a group project coordinator name so that will be the person that we um communicate with about um you know making sure the annual report is coming in complete and on time and if we have any questions about it and we'll also assign a group id if you if you choose to report as a group we'll assign you a group id and then you can use that on all of the reporting forms in lieu of your individual permit id there are two ids that are of particular importance when you're reporting because they relate information across multiple forms one of those is the release site id so we are not assigning any kind of a convention for naming these sites it's completely up to your project what what standard you want to use for that but whatever you do choose to use you need to be consistent with it so the release site id will be referenced on the release site assessment form also on the landowner attestation form also on the beaver handling form because that document's where you're releasing that individual beaver and also on the post release monitoring form so it's really important to make sure that whatever release site id you're using it's consistent across all of those forms and that's true in both the paper versions and the electronic survey 123 versions the other id that needs to be consistent is the individual beaver id um and so you know julie mentioned that they they do name their beavers but they also have a more formal id that's based on you know year and location and some other things and so again that's up to your project how you want to assign those but whatever you choose to assign again needs to be consistent because that'll be used on both the beaver handling form for reporting captures releases and mortalities and then also on the daily observation log so i'm just going to walk through the paper forms like i said we've already looked at most of these so i'll move pretty quickly the release site suitability assessment form we ask for some basic location information we want to know which project it's affiliated with here's that site id i was talking about for assigning an identification to this really potential release site um julie already talked about surveying the site for occupancy this is the same information we're asking for during the post release monitoring um you know based on occupancy is it suitable or unsuitable um describing the level of social tolerance and based on that is it suitable or unsuitable and then describing any potential damage and is it suitable or unsuitable so those are really kind of go no-go indicators for site suitability before you even begin to look at the habitat and then this um julie has already walked us through all of this so i'm not going to go through it again but scoring all of these different habitat features to come up with a final determination of whether the site is acceptable or not acceptable so all of the same information will be in the electronic forms that bill's going to walk us through this is the land owner attestation form we've already looked at this one too this just has some basic information about the property contact information for the landowner and then this attestation that we've already walked through that acknowledges they want to receive a beaver they acknowledge the beaver might disperse it might die it might cause flooding and other things and that they have talked with any potentially affected neighboring landowners and that they'll give you access for post release monitoring this is an important one too to make sure they know that you need to come out there at least three more times to see whether those beavers are sticking around in that property this one does not have an electronic version we only have the paper form because it requires a signature um this is the beaver handling form that julie already walked us through so again that permit id either your individual or group depending on how you're operating and reporting if you didn't end up relocating any beavers you can just check no and you're done but if you did then we need to know which you know the beaver id for every beaver that you captured um age again is based on weight like like julie talked about and sex only if your project requires sexy beavers that is an optional um value if you don't know it you can just mark unknown and that's fine um some information about where the capture occurred and when and then the release date and again there's that site id that we need to be consistent with this does have some some notation if you want to use the the acronyms for these values but basically for age we're asking for these categories adult sub adult kit and unknown those are based on those weight classes that julie talked about and then sex female male and unknown on the back side of that form we ask if you know of any mortality so this would be mortalities that occurred in the trap or during transport or in the facility or if you do happen to document any mortalities after release we know that's unlikely but sometimes it does happen and if that does happen it would be really helpful to know about it so again there's that beaver id making sure we're being consistent with that and then we describe these different mortality types down here and mortality causes and i think julie talked about those also so this one we do have an electronic version of this form um and you can you can choose to use either it'd be great if you can use the the electronic performance less paperwork for everybody um here's the daily observation log um we did go through this one or i think alec walked us through this one earlier today this one we do not have an electronic version and this is the only form where if you choose you can use your your project form instead of this one if you already have something that you're using but basically this one keeps track of you know for each enclosure or depending on how big your facility is you may not have more than one but for each enclosure you're keeping track of which beavers are being held in there some basic information about them and then each day you're observing making sure the temperature is appropriate checking off that you've cleaned the water keeping track of how much food they're eating and making note of any um health um concerns or behavioral abnormalities that that might be of note so just making sure that you're you're keeping an eye on all of these things to monitor those beavers while they're while they're in your care and then the last one this is that post release monitoring form again some basic information about which which permit this is associated with there's that site id again the date that you released the beaver at this site and then there are the three post release surveys so for survey one what date did you go out your upstream survey your downstream survey and then i guess i didn't include the second page on here but there's two more sets of these for survey two and survey three with the same information so hopefully those are all pretty straightforward i sent you a copy of all of those with that packet of of documents right before the training began let me know if you do have any questions about them i'll check the chat just to see if anything has come up i don't see anything but um hopefully those are fairly straightforward and let me know if you do have any questions otherwise we'll move on to bill's portion right thanks sarah and uh please um jump in if uh if you want to expound on anything that i talk about in terms of the forms but they do as you know they were built straight from those paper forms so they're basically a reflection of those uh pardon my little dogs here they are a reflection of those paper forms so um i'll launch right into that if that's okay let me grab the screen real quick oops okay you should be seeing my desktop now um so the first thing um so these electronic data forms are um used with a piece of software called survey123 and survey123 is just a piece of software that runs either on your desktop computer or on a mobile device like a smartphone or a tablet and you can find it either in the the app stores for your your mobile device um whichever one you're using um or you can download um but the software for free you've got to have an account to use it so that's the thing but let me give you let me share to you this location where you can download the software from and for those of you that already have an account with us um if you'd like to you can follow along it uh i'll i'll be kind of zooming through most of this stuff um i wouldn't worry too much about memorizing every detail of survey one two three um we will provide you with some written documentation for how to use the program um and i believe this is being recorded so maybe you can refer to it at a later time as well and of course you can always email email me williamsemper dfw if you've got technical issues with the forms at all so this is more of to just kind of introduce you to the software and to the forms and help just kind of familiarize you with that so that when you open it up it looks familiar and and you kind of know a couple of the little quirks about it so quick introduction to the software so um so you have the link to get to this webpage if you want to download it for your desktop and you see some options here i should just i want to point out i wish they didn't have this here and i wish they didn't have this here because it's confusing what you really want is this one in the middle that says survey123 for arcgis field app so ignore these two on the side and just pick the download for the platform that you want to use it on both of these versions for windows seem to work fine if you don't know if you have 64-bit architecture or not use the x86 that should work on everything um and you'll download an installer and you don't need admin privileges to install it if you're working on your work computer and you don't have those it'll just install to your user directory and and work right away um but i'm not i'm going to skip over that it just takes a minute or two but i've already installed it on my pc here so i'm just going to start it on up on my windows pc and i haven't logged into it right now so if you if you start it up and you're not signed into the program you're going to see something like this and just click here and uh if you are a wdfw employee you use this enterprise login method that you probably already know about but if you are having an account to our citizen science hub you're going to use this arcgis login method so i'm going to go ahead and do that uh bill one question for folks who are who have accounts for the habitat web map access is it going to be the same username and password for them to access these forms yes so you so everyone uh that comes in become permitted will get added into i we'll have an account on our citizen science hub you'll be added to the group and all of these materials the uh the three mobile data forms as well as access to the web map uh will come with that basically okay perfect thank you so yeah just remember those credentials of course if you forget them there's a way to reset your password so um but those are the credentials that you want to use um so you click on that and now you're signed in and now it says this which means that you you have the app installed but you need to get the survey forms downloaded to your device and the way that you do that is to first off is to just click this button and that takes you to this download surveys page in the app and what you're seeing here is a list of all of the different survey forms that have been made available to you based on your group membership so if you're in the beaver relocator group you're going to see these three forms now you might um if you if you're interested uh you know we're setting up more and more citizen science projects that cover a variety of different things and having that account will allow you access to to participate in some of these other projects as well potentially so that could come in handy later and you see i've got a couple other projects in here right now but in terms of the beaver stuff it's these three uh forms that um you know correspond to the data sheets that sarah was just showing us so and you'll also notice that there's a little uh icon here uh cloud with this down arrow and what that signifies is that you don't have you have the form available to you but it's not yet on your device so to download it to your device just go ahead and click on that icon specifically and it just takes a few seconds obviously you have to have an internet connection to both to sign in to the form and to to download these forms to your device so you can if you have this on your phone and say you don't have internet connectivity when you're in the field and you want to use it in the field it works fine doing that but in order to get the form and in order to sign in the first time you've got up you've got to do that somewhere where you have that connectivity so you'll notice when you've after you've downloaded a form to your device that this icon changes from a cloud with down arrow to these circling arrows and what that signifies is that the uh the form has been downloaded to your device uh you can click it again and what that does is it will it will uh it will update the form um like say for instance um we decide we want it to look different or we want to add a field or change something maybe there's a bug in the form that's messing things up and we've figured out how to fix it but you need to get the new version onto your device in order to use it you would come to this download survey screen and click on this and that will update your update the form without losing any of the data that you may have saved on your device that you haven't yet submitted to arcgis online arcgis online again is the cloud data service that all of this data is getting fed into um so i have downloaded all three of these forms and i'm going to head back to the main screen by clicking on this this arrow up in the corner so now i'm back to the my survey screen which is going to show all the different survey forms that you have present on your device and ready to use um so now to start using those and by the way if you need to get back to download surveys look for this menu you know this these three horizontal lines signify this is the menu kind of a context menu depending on what screen you're on so you might have different options depending on what screen but from my surveys if you click on that you can uh you can sign in and out you can adjust some settings or you can head to the download survey page which is what we were just looking at so a little bit of background there so now let's say um you you're ready to start surveying and you want to use one of these so i'll go ahead and start off with the longest of the three the beaver release site assessment which is also the one if you remember recall from yesterday um those points that were present on the web map that i was showing you this is the only um data set that is showing in that web map from these three forms so far so so as far as i know we don't plan to show these in the web map but this one you will because that could be convenient both for you and for other potential relocators if they want to sort of see that somebody's been out there and they've assessed the site and so on and what the characteristics were so i'm going to go ahead and click on this and you'll see here's the title of the form the icons a little bit of metadata right here i might include some instructions at some point in this area uh but you're always going to see something here that says collect and uh so to to collect some data click on collect and it opens up basically this is as if you have one blank copy of your data sheet um so you're just going to go in and fill in fields the same way that you would on a paper data sheet and so i'm just going to kind of very briefly kind of go through this and explain how some of these work again sarah please chime in if you've got some extra info or if i say something wrong the first one is your site id and as sarah just described that's it's kind of free form and up to you to do but it's important to be consistent so this field um right now is a freeformed text alphanumeric field uh meaning you can write whatever you want to in here um but again uh you're gonna want to keep track of what you're entering that like the exact value that you're entering here um and that means capitalization that means if you include a dash somewhere or several dashes and and what your numbering system is you're going to want to be consistent with that so that's kind of on you to do you have 50 characters to to do it with in this form and you'll notice that that number kind of is going to reflect um how many you have left you know when you've entered something in there so so try not to exceed 50 characters for your for your ids i've done that across the board for site id beaver id um permit id so far um and i guess we can change that if we need to if if we need to make it longer than that um i should probably know about that fairly soon because that's one of those things that we we want to set out to have it have it work right off the bat yeah i can't imagine they would need to be longer than that i think most of them will be quite a bit shorter than that sounds good all right so uh that site id for you um the next one here is uh this is a location control and i i may have mentioned that the the data that you're submitting through survey one two three is typically because this is the gis centric format is going to have some kind of a geographic component to it and and on the paper data sheet that's just two fields that have latitude and longitude values um in survey 123 you have this this neat sort of location control that you can use so i'm going to spend a minute or two explaining how this works and this will kind of work across the board um for different survey 123 forms so probably the most typical way to to use this is you can actually capture a gps location with that and the way that you would go about doing that is to click once on this little crosshair icon and that kind of gets you a location and right now it's showing this location because uh you know i'm at home on my pc doesn't have a gps chip but it's it's looking at my ip address which for some reason says i'm i'm not too far away from centralia um so that's what it will be if you do that on your computer if you're doing this out in the field on your on your smart device um it is going to use the gps chip on that device which which works whether or not you're connected to the internet so um it's going to take your location uh it's going to display your location in decimal degrees with the plus or minus on your accuracy and you'll notice that's really high because of the aforementioned ip thing i was talking about kind of a best practice for using this location control what i suggest people to do if you're going to try to capture your gps on the field um is to tap it once to kind of prime the pump so to speak um get get a crude location it turns your gps on when you do that then what you're going to want to do is tap and hold for a couple of seconds until it starts flashing and then you'll notice this changes to averaged something of something positions and this continues to flash until you tap once on it and then it stops and and it shows this and what that's doing is it's collecting multiple sort of sequential locations while that uh averaging is taking place and it's going to that your actual coordinates here are actually going to be the average of those x and y coordinates and that most of the time that's going to improve your your location uh considerably i would suggest that you you know anywhere between 5 and 15 of these is probably a good amount more isn't necessarily better if you collect lots and lots of locations it can actually make it less precise because you've got spurious signals going on so so anything above like five five to ten is is just about right um so that's what that that's that's what i suggest that people do when they're doing that if you uh if say you're say you're collecting your stuff on paper and you're just gonna do your data entry later on when you get back home or back to the office so maybe you um maybe you marked up a paper map or maybe you took your coordinates um your your lat long with the gps out in the field um you can you can use the map control to enter that stuff as well and the way to do that is to click anywhere in the map here and you go into kind of go into the control and you can either kind of just draw or digitize your location by moving the map around and you'll notice the crosshairs stay in the center and that's where the point is going to be located uh you can and obviously you can you can zoom and and you can also change your base map around if you if you would like to use a different base map um uh if you happen to have those coordinates handy um and hopefully they're in decimal degrees because that's just the easiest way to deal with those you can actually enter them directly here into this bar so for instance i can put in 47 latitude space and then because i'm in the western hemisphere i'm going to put negative 122. so these are very general coordinates i you're going to want to have probably four or five decimal points after those numbers to really get it down to a specific location but you'll notice that the pin is locating based on those values that you're putting here and so you just want to remember since we're in the western hemisphere if you're doing that use the negative sign or you can um and you notice if i get rid of it now we're on the other side of the world but you can also just put the w after it and it will put it back in the right place um i think you can also use a comma to separate these it's it's a it's a pretty smart little um uh control here you can also enter in something like um uh you know an address into the bar here and if you have internet collect connectivity it will look that up for you and um place that you know right exactly where that addre where it thinks that address is um so that's another way to kind of put that point on the map um if you want to do it that way in any case when you're done and you're happy with wherever the point is um just click on this um check mark and then you're back here and it's recorded your your lat long and it's also recorded them into these fields so these fields in the form right now are read only but they're based on whatever you did here in the location control so so that's that um let's see the rest of the stuff is fairly straightforward you've got another free entry text box for some notes on your location for the name of the permittee for your permit number and here you've got a date picker for the assessment date and that is all very um intuitive you can clear it out by doing that so i think all of these forms that i'm showing you today actually have multiple pages that's just so that you're not scrolling scrolling scrolling to inner stuff so you'll notice we're on page one of four and to get to the next one just use these arrows at the bottom of the form so here's all of that upstream downstream um characteristics that you were looking at in the paper form um these since their account you can either click into the box and enter that count directly or you can use these kind of clicker-like controls to just increment that number if that's quicker in the field i try to minimize things that involve typing because typing is awkward so anytime you can just kind of click something that's usually easier if you happen to accidentally enter a negative number here it it will let you do that until it's time to submit the form and then the form won't let you submit it'll give you a message and it'll pop you back to the field that's offending so um it'll let you correct that so no negative fields into uh into these um no negative values into these fields up here please um let's see and actually i'm going to do that just so i can demonstrate what that looks like in a minute these are all just kind of yes no present absent values for these other things and it's very intuitive you can you can you know you can toggle one or the other or neither but really you should toggle one or the other i like to use this format um when there's only a couple of values because you get to see both you know you see the both options and you and you can see that you've selected the one that you want when they look like this and if you'll notice down here around the other characteristic if you toggle that to present another field's gonna pop up for you to enter some text um that describes whatever uh you're referring to here and that kind of um demonstrates uh one of the features that to be aware of with these survey123 forms is that sometimes we build in a little bit of logic to the form that depending on your response to one question another field might appear or disappear depending on that response and that's pretty nifty but i just want to make you aware that if by by design or by accident if you happen to to create you know make one of these fields present and then you add you know some notes here um and then maybe you decide uh maybe i i'm not i'm not gonna maybe that's not worth noting and you and you toggle this back to absent and then you have another change of heart or maybe you've just accidentally tapped one of these things um and you tap it back and you'll notice that that value is gone so um if if you if you by by toggling something and you make it disappear any data that's in that field will disappear and have to be re-entered if there is actually some data in there so i just want to make you aware of that this one this one example isn't very dire i mean it's pretty easy to enter that stuff in again if you need to for something like this and so i left this as a toggle you'll see in a couple of the other forms that there's a little bit more fancy kind of form logic and i've tried to make it a little bit more difficult to accidentally do something like that but i just want to make you aware of that behavior in the form so the downstream is just a repeat of the upstream so uh heading on to the next page uh in the form uh we get to the the stuff that sarah was noting is is kind of the more actionable um uh you know the the the very sort of uh strict you know is this gonna be like a no go or no go kind of decision making for the the site in terms of its suitability um and again these are just yes no but i've made these so that you need to do a couple of clicks to do that because there are conditionals built off of these and i don't want you to accidentally hit something and clear that stuff out so so just um depending on on what you read here and what's on the paper data sheet you know determine whether these things are toggled suitable or unsuitable you've got some more note fields here to kind of expound on that and if you select if it winds up that all three of these um conditions are suitable uh you'll get a little message down here in green that says um you know continue on to the next page to do the rest of the assessment um if if any of them are not you won't get this you'll get a different one but you can still fill in that that kind of scorecard part of the form as well but but you'll notice on the other part of the form um it will automatically toggle youtube the site is unsuitable so basically if any one of the three of these conditions are are not suitable then you know that the site is going to be determined as unsuitable although you can still kind of score it and maybe that's of interest for you know model validation or just our notes or or whatever else i mean you did go out and travel to the site so you may as well score it um so heading on to that fourth page here you are and here's that kind of a scorecard stuff and um you've got some pick lists um and we've we've sort of noted what these things mean in terms of the gradient and in terms of the points some of these aren't expounded upon but they're like oh yeah these are intermediate between between these other ones that are kind of explicated in the form so pick the one that makes sense um and kind of go through here by the way you'll also notice that these uh these fields have an asterisk and that red asterisk on a field notes that denotes that um that field is required that field must have a value uh in order for the form to be submittable um so if you don't have a value there then it will again kind of complain and it won't let you submit it until a value is selected for those fields um so that's what that red asterisk means so just kind of go through and fill out your scorecard um and uh so i'm just randomly picking stuff here you'll notice that there might be things in here that sort of creates subtotals of the points on different different um fields but you're continuing to sort of fill out the form and let's just say i enter all this stuff um and okay so if i had selected that all three of these were suitable one of the things that'll show is uh this final total score which is the sum of all of the uh uh all of the point values that are are appropriate for these fields above so you get your total it's read-only it's calculated um here you get a little kind of thing to sort of let you know how good or bad it was um you can put some more notes in and then you get this final determination and this is read-only it's calculated and it's based on the answers to these three questions basically so they all have to be suitable for this to read acceptable um at the bottom and that is that form and assuming you've done the whole thing in kind of one go and you're happy with with the answers and you've kind of reviewed it and it's ready to submit you would come in here and click on this um check mark oh and here's where you'll notice oops it has to be non-negative so here's where you get to fix the thing that was wrong from before and then you need to toggle back to the fourth page and find that check mark try it again um here's your three options continue the survey we'll cancel out of this and you're back into the form um send now is will be available as an option if you have an internet connection at that moment in time and that will just submit the form directly to to the cloud data set on arcgis online um which is usually a fine thing to do because you can actually use survey123 to edit this stuff later on if you choose to um but if you if you don't have internet connectivity or if you want to maybe review this some more before you you upload it um you can click on send later and what that'll do is it will save it that record on your device it has not yet been submitted to the cloud but it's here on your device in this thing called the outbox and the outbox doesn't exist that you can see it on here until something is in the outbox and that's that's true of a couple of different boxes that you're going to see in a minute so if i click on the out box i'll see that uh by the way these things are blank because i left the fields blank in the form but you'll you'll have something here like the date and the site identifier and stuff like that so you'll have some way to sort of distinguish this entry from others that you might have in your outbox you can you can delete it if it turns out that that's something that you want to do and you don't want to send in or you can you can send all of if you click on this button it's going to submit everything that's in the out box and if you click on the list entry it's going to give you this do you want to continue and edit and i do right now so let me put in a descriptor such as test and then maybe i want to put in a date just so i can show you what this looks like in the list view um we'll call this tester and permit number 111 and head back here and send later and now you'll notice here's the person here's the permittee here's the date here's the site id so that that should help you keep track of that stuff and i'm gonna go ahead and send it now that this this uh kind of garbage record i'm gonna delete it other data set later but let's just make sure that this works and hit send and if everything's working good then it is leaves your out box it gets submitted to the cloud data set so everything's looking good and you you wind up with a you keep a copy of it on your device here in the scent box that you can open up and review and you can also go in here and actually edit values like uh maybe i was at the wrong site so i'm actually changing this value and i'm gonna head back through here and uh send later um and which will put it back in my out box but you'll notice now the site name has changed and i can send it again that's not going to send a second record it's going to actually update the existing record so that's actually a pretty cool way to uh kind of qa qc your own work later on it's actually much easier and more intuitive to do this i think to do that editing in survey123 than trying to actually do it in the web map for various reasons um so keep that in mind when you're doing when you're working on this stuff um and so yeah i've shown you the scent box i've shown you the outbox oh i should uh there's there's one other box that you should probably be aware of so say i'm in here and i'm and i'm working on my survey and maybe i get interrupted halfway through the survey and i got to do something else but i'm going to come back to it later but i don't have all the required fields filled out you can also come up here to the x button and click on the x continues just going to kick you back into the form um but the thing i wanted and and then this will actually close it this is if you just want to dump that survey and your and you want to dump whatever changes you made you would choose this one but the thing i wanted to show you is that you can also just save it on your device in the drafts box and what that does is it's just another box it's saved on device and you can go back into it later and complete it and submit it and do all that other kind of good stuff so that is a quick overview of just kind of generally how survey123 works um i can answer some questions after this but i want to show you the other forms as well again if you didn't catch all of that in the first go-round i'm going to send you a uh you know when you set up your account i'll send you a like a 10-page you know uh kind of primer into survey123 that'll explain some of this stuff in more detail um and of course you can always ask us questions and stuff like that we'll figure it out but that's all i've got to say for the release site so let me show you what these other ones look like oh by the way you also get this little badge here that lets you know if it's orange it's how many how many records are in your drafts you know if it's if it's green that's your outbox et cetera et cetera so that's kind of nice um so the next one let me show you is the uh post release monitoring so this is the one that you'll be filling out um subsequent to actually relocating a beaver um and you can go in and basically as sarah was mentioning before you're looking at submitting either three paper data sheets one for each of your subsequent visits or you can or you'll be setting submitting three separate records here uh three separate post release monitoring records so you could come in to collect um you get a little bit of uh instructions here in the header um and then you know here designate is this the first is this the first follow-up survey is this the second one or is this the third one so just toggle to the appropriate one um here's your permit id again pay attention to capitalization pay attention to to whatever punctuation you use with that same with this um you know all this stuff is the same kind of stuff that you're you're looking at before you get a location control here and so this is for your site id so go ahead and and and capture something accurate here just um i probably should change this to be decimal degrees i'll update that in the form um but it also gives you uh you know to get to the next page click on the arrow below you've only got two pages here um and here's again in the in the uh survey form you get to pick the survey date um you uh you've got your up upstream and downstream stuff and here i've got these colla in in a group of fields and i've got them collapsed to save space um but you expand those by clicking on the arrow and now you can do all the same kind of stuff that you were looking at in the prior form and it works the same way um so for both upstream and downstream and then you're you're done for this particular thing so this is actually going to require you to fill this out so i'm just going to kind of do this for these for the moment um let's see because i want to show you um you know i just want to demonstrate to you how this works so i'm going to go ahead and do this so later it's in my out box and now it's showing you again the the permittee the site et cetera et cetera and first survey so you're gonna you're gonna need to have you know first second third surveys submitted and you you don't have to submit them all at once you can submit them as you go that's fine currently these records are not being displayed in that web map that we showed earlier so we're kind of just interested in the tabular information as far as i'm aware i mean we are collecting that location information but it's getting recorded as lat long back in the on the back end so so that's an easy one the the post release monitoring form and then you've got your kind of your annual report summary your beaver handling form again go into the form click on collect and again this is the same stuff that we're looking at earlier in the paper data sheet for this form there's a single field that's like did you capture release transport handle uh or have any beaver mortalities this year and it's a yes or no and and as she met as sarah just mentioned um you know if you click no then you're done and you're ready to submit here um to kind of break that up and to introduce a little bit of form logic i we separated those out into separate um separate toggles and again i tried to make these even though they were yes or no i tried to make it so that it's it's it's a little bit more a couple of more steps for you to to actually um uh uh do this so you don't accidentally wipe something out by hitting the wrong toggle later on um because there are some conditional stuff that are going on with these fields if if all three of them are toggled to know the next page is going to be blank and you'll see that in just a minute but basically uh depending on what you enter here is gonna it's gonna determine what what you see on the next page so uh so what i would suggest is is you know hopefully get this right the first time i mean you can always change it later but to avoid the the possibility of accidentally blanking out some of your data maybe just think about it's going to be obvious to you whether you need to enter you know captures releases or mortalities and of course hopefully you have no mortalities but uh uh here we go so i'm just going to say yes to all of these the first time around to show you what happens when these are all toggled to yes um before i go any farther um so survey one two three uh because it's a gis thing and it assumes that you need to submit some geographic information it it forces you to collect some kind of coordinate um to go along with this record now in this case you're not necessarily looking for a single coordinate to go with just this survey um but you've got to have one and although i could you know depending on what people say and what feedback we get and what sarah what sarah asked me to do with this i could just hide this form and it would it would default this location to be zero latitude zero longitude what i found from other surveys is that it's less confusing for people when it's time to review this including us on the back end if there's some kind of a location there that makes some sense so that this location kind of is is sort of meaningless in terms of the the the form itself but if you want to go ahead and just take your gps location even if it's just kind of your internet location at least that kind of puts it on the map somewhere that is sort of semi-meaningful so i'm going to leave that in there if you don't do anything at all it's either going to auto populate and kind of take a guess at where you were or it might put in zero zero in any case this isn't a very important field and and future versions of this forum we might actually just hide this behind the scenes but i just want to let you know that if you select your current location you're going to do fine it's kind of meaningless to the rest of the form so here's another notes field so now that we've answered these three fields let's head to the next page and so if you look at that paper form for this beaver handling that paper form has a table and that table has these long rows that start with beaver id and it talks about captures it's got columns for captures columns for releases columns for mortality so in the same way as that you're basically looking at all of the information that's going to pertain to one single row on that paper data sheet and that's all here for you in this one kind of a scroll um and so this is one little feature of survey123 this is something called a repeat and what this what this signifies is that you've got all of these fields that are here um that are kind of bounded by this thing at the bottom this control that says one of one it lets you set up a many to one relationship so you've got the one in this case is the header that your form uh here on the the page one and here on the second page you can actually have multiple um beavers signified by each by their own beaver id so for instance i could have beaver a um that i want to enter some stuff about its age and sex and its capture uh release and mortality history and if i want to enter something about beaver b that also happened that during that reporting period i can come in here and click on the plus sign well it won't let me do until i until i figure fill out these required fields so it might here i'm just going to put in some some garbage values here just so i can demonstrate this stuff um um again um you'll see why we made this conditional because you know if you didn't if it wasn't immortality you don't want to have to fill out these mandatory fields in order to do that but uh basically i can come down here to the bottom of the repeat click on the plus and it kicks you back to the top of the form but if you were to go to the bottom it tells you you're on record two of two so that would be the next row on that paper data sheet and you would come in and do all the same kind of stuff in these in these fields um so so that's how that is supposed to work and if you need to to review or edit or or just look at that stuff between these different records you use the arrows here in the repeat to sort of toggle to the and of course it doesn't want to let you do that until you've done these required stuff so that's kind of annoying um but that's how that's supposed to work you can also okay maybe i didn't enter any information for beaver b maybe beaver b was a mistake and i don't need to enter it now i just want to delete this this repeated record i can click on the um thing that says confirm that you want to delete two of two and that's yes and now i'm back to to my record for beaver a so that's how that works what i wanted to show you about the conditional stuff so now i've entered some some information here in the in these fields say i go back here and i want to change some of the stuff like oh it turns i messed up i really there weren't any mortalities this year so i'm gonna i'm gonna click this to know that means if i head back to uh this this repeat part of the part of the form now i don't see any information about mortalities because i said that i didn't have any mortalities in this reporting period so you won't have to enter those fields so so that's how that works and then if of course if you're like oh actually there was one you know and you have to come back here and turn it back on then if you had any information there you could have to re-enter it um the same is true of these other ones if you if you select no then they go away and in the corresponding things so again just be cognizant of of what you know what you're really trying to say um in these forms as you fill this stuff out um and let's see and if you answer no to all three of these no not just blank but they have to actually say no if if the answer all three of these things are no and you click on this you're going to get this weird little message that says uh you had no captures released or mortalities um but uh click on the check mark to submit so that check mark is only available on the second page and so hopefully this is and i don't know why it's like scrolling me down to the bottom here but um anyhow uh hopefully this is this is correct with what you intended to say and if it is then go ahead and just click on the check mark and oops you need something here um and um you can see how annoying we've made this but this is great for us because it means that we don't um we don't wind up with blanks and things that we absolutely need to have some kind of a value for so that's what that's all these required fields are all about um so um i'm gonna send later it's in my outbox and again you can see it in the list view and review it submit it delete it whatever you want to do with it so that's how all of that stuff works um let me look at my outline and see if there was anything else uh i think that that's everything that i wanted to go over and it looks like i've got five minutes uh still on the agenda if every anyone's got any questions or um uh comments let's see i'll look in the comments i don't see anything um was that was that generally clear to most folks that were you able to see everything that i was doing um it looks like maybe somebody has their hand up yeah hi it's amanda with cascade forest conservancy um it's just easier to ask over a voice um i'm way more used to using collector and with that you know you're able to have your map and your reference points on there are you able to do that with surveys one through three like if we had the relocation site um and just wanted a dot there to know how to get back to it can you do that in surveys one two three uh okay so yeah survey one two three and collector can work together they're part of this whole suite of things um so in order the way that we've got it set up right now we haven't done a whole lot of collector integration because some people are familiar with it because they've used it before other people aren't and we're kind of we're kind of um trying to pitch this to the the people with the you know assuming they have the the least level of experience and survey123 is a reflection of these paper data sheets so we've focused on survey one two three um i mentioned yesterday when we were looking at that web map that i think that web map should be loadable into collector and you should be able to kind of use it to navigate in the field i don't have well technically the point layer that survey one two three and most of this is isn't going to make sense to most of the people listening i'm assuming if you don't have this background knowledge but if you do know a bit about cloud collector works you know that if you have an editable point layer in the collector map you can create a point and then you can um uh uh edit the field values and things like that so my answer to you is the only the only editable point that's present in that current web map is the the site assessment point so in theory you could uh you could use collector to put down a point in the field and you would be able to populate at least some of those fields uh in the in the uh that site assessment form possibly all of them because i don't think there's any repeats in that form so you may be able to do that purely in collector i i think that survey123 is a much better data entry thing since it kind of resembles the datasheet but in theory you could do that with collector we we don't have these other point layers exposed in that map so you would have to use survey123 to to do that for the the beaver um uh handling and for the uh uh post monitoring form um we we might want to look at using collector more in the future and it depends again some people are going to find it more useful than other people um and and i i feel like in order to kind of roll this out to a to a group of folks that are might might be brand new to this i really want to have some documentation in there because collector can be a much more involved process you you're downloading maps to your thing and there's a whole there's a whole suite of things that kind of go along with that so we kind of want to build out some more how-to into that but if you already know how to do it then in theory you could work it that way at least for the site assessment um what would be nice and and uh hopefully i'm not blathering on too long um what would be nice if you could put down a point uh in the field using collector and then later on open that point and edit that record in survey123 and uh the answer to doing that right now is kind of yes and no so i think you could start a record in that point thing but in order for you to open that point i wouldn't i would need to enable some more stuff in survey 123 so short answer is no i wouldn't recommend doing that although you might be able to get away with that um does that kind of answer your question yeah definitely and i mean we could just have both programs going and use one for for navigating and getting to the spot and then just pull up surveys one two three and fill that out i want to talk to i want to uh i don't want to get too far out ahead of of the project leads who have kind of specified the stuff sarah um and so i don't want to i don't want to add too much stuff or kind of commit to too many things right now but some one thing we could look at if we have a lot of users who are familiar and want to use collector to just kind of drop points onto that map we could looking at just we could look at just adding a simple waypoint point that we could just kind of drop points of interest into that map that we could refer to later so that's maybe something we could look at adding later on but for right now it's just not available because we haven't set it up that way oh great thank you great thank you bill i don't see any other questions in the chat but do you folks have anything else that they want to want to ask about while we've got bill here all right um so that brings us to our afternoon break then thank you bill for walking us through that that was great um we're gonna come back at three o'clock for our final sort of open discussion and and wrap up we talked a little bit about um having having jonas tell us a little bit more about this um edna research project this afternoon or if folks have any other questions that have come up over the day that were unanswered or that they want to talk about a little bit more or if um you know if there are any folks who want to share more information or think that there was something that um we didn't cover thoroughly enough and you have some more um more perspective or experience to share we would really love to hear that um especially the you know this morning during the conservation in action session we we we filled that up with some really great information so if anybody didn't get a chance to speak and wants to talk more about um their project i think that would be really really good for folks to hear whether that's a new developing project or or an established project so um go ahead and take your bait take your break and get your refreshments and then come back at 3 o'clock and we'll wrap up with any any outstanding discussion thanks everybody