Changes Coming to Complete Tag History Reports - Update

Updated August 28 to indicate that the scheduled date of implementation has been changed to September 7, 2017.

Summary

As part of ongoing upgrades to PTAGIS related to the release of P4 and implementation of the MRR data model, the Complete Tag History Quick Report and Query Builder 2 Report will map the Tag/Event values from P3/P4 files differently for the following attributes: Event Date, Event Site and Event Site RKM. New attributes will be added called Event Release Date, Event Release Site and Event Release Site RKM, which will report the Release values from P3/P4 files. These changes, originally scheduled for August 30, have now been moved to September 7, 2017.

If you use Complete Tag History please review the information in this article about how Event Date, Event Site, and Event Site RKM are currently mapped to the tagging files, and how the mapping will change. If you use these attributes as filter parameters in the Complete Tag History Query Builder 2 report, your results could change.

Background

The Complete Tag History report returns one row per event per tag. For those events (Mark and Recapture) where it is possible to report two dates and two sites, we attempted to distill them into one date and one site that would best represent that event, and called the attributes Event Date and Event Site. We chose to map the Release Date and Release Site values from the files to those attributes for several reasons:

1. Data contributors can use Virtual Release Times (VRTs) in P3 files to report multiple Release Dates in one file, but not multiple Tag Dates. In those files where VRTs are used, the Release Date is the most representative date for that event, and the Tag Date may not be accurate for all records in the file.
2. If the Release Date value is mapped to Event Date attribute in the Complete Tag History report, it made the most sense to also map Release Site and Release RKM values to the Event Site and Event Site RKM attributes respectively. 

Issue

The more explicitly event-based MRR data model implemented with P4 replaced the Tag Date and Tag Site fields in P3 files with Event Date and Event Site fields to better reflect the different types of data collection events recorded in PTAGIS. Those P4 fields, however, are not currently mapped to the Event Date and Event Site attributes in Complete Tag History.

In addition, the Event Date and Event Site attributes in the current reports work well for P3 files where both the Tag Date and Tag Site are the same as the Release Date and Release Site, or where VRTs are used. However, where the Tag Date and/or Tag Site are different from the Release Date/Release Site values, this does not work well because it is not possible to discern from the file the most appropriate date and site to use for the reported event.

To address both of these issues, the Complete Tag History reporting data source (both the Quick Report and the Query Builder 2 report) will be updated to display two possible dates and sites for each event record: Event Date/Event Site and Event Release Date/Event Release Site.

Details

The table below shows how fields from P3 and P4 files are currently mapped to Event attributes in Complete Tag History reports.

On September 7 (rescheduled from August 30), the attributes will be mapped according to this table:

These changes were made with careful consideration based upon feedback from researchers on how to make reporting of PIT-tag related events less ambiguous and more intuitive. Please contact us if you have questions or need help updating your reports.