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RENAME ACOUSTIC FILES & CREATE PROJECT METADATA CSV

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Make sure all manual vetting of all deployments is complete before moving onto this section.

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Continue following the steps in the “Processing stationary acoustic data in Kaleidoscope Pro” guidance. Listed below is additional guidance and information for following the directions while submitting FBB regulatory data to USFWS.

 

1. Even if the “Audio Recording Time” column of the metadata output has the correct timestamps, the files should still be renamed to match the NABat naming format. NABat provides R script for doing this which can be found on the Quick Links to Resources page.

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NOTE ABOUT THE NABat FILE RENAMER TOOL

The NABat File Renamer Tool used in the training videos is no longer functional. The Batch RenameAcoustic Files script is available and posted to the Quick Links to Resources page. 

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2. Once files are all renamed, go back to Kaleidoscope Pro to create the project-level metadata CSV. The “Processed” folder should be your input directory, as it contains all your processed files. Make sure your output directory is not the same. One suggestion is to simply move up one directory from the “Processed” folder to the project folder.

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3. Once you have acquired the final project-level metadata CSV, the following three (a, b, c) tasks must be done to complete the metadata CSV before moving onto the final steps of uploading the data into the Partner Portal. The following three tasks can be done in any order:
 

a) If weather parameters were not included during data processing in Kaleidoscope, these are two ways to embed them into the metadata CSV (if they were embedded into the files using Kaleidoscope, skip this task):

 

USING R AND EXCEL

Enter data into the as appropriate for your project, then delete the descriptive second row. Save that file in the same directory as your metadata CSV with the simple name “weather.csv”. Run the “Nightly_Weather” R script, being sure to change directories as appropriate (there are three places where you need to do this in the script). Make sure to save your new metadata CSV that has weather parameters with a different name than the original. Running this script will also take care of task c.

 

USING EXCEL ONLY

Open the meta.csv file in Excel and sort the data in chronological order (sort data by “Audio Recording Time”). Fill in the parameters as appropriate.

 

b) If any files are manually vetted as Noise (on purpose or accidentally), they are moved into the Noise folder by Kaleidoscope. Even if the manual vetter goes back and changes the manual Noise ID to a bat species, that file will still be in the Noise folder unless moved by the user. While we do not want all Noise files to be uploaded into NABat, any call files auto-ID’d as EUMFLO that are then manually vetted as Noise should be included, but they will remain in the Noise folder until moved by the user.

 

USING R

Run the "Move Files Function" R script for all your folders to make sure all the appropriate files are included in the compressed tarball file to upload into NABat. This script will utilize the project metadata CSV. Make sure to change the directories in the actual move_files() function. 

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USING EXCEL

Use Excel to organize your metadata CSV by manual IDs, find all the file names of said data, and check that none of them are still in NOISE folders.

 

c) If any files were auto-identified as CORTOW, they will need to be corrected to CORRAF. If you used the “Nightly_Weather” R Script for task a, then this should already be done. If not, simply use the “Find and Replace” function (Ctrl + H) after opening the metadata CSV in Excel. Enter “CORTOW” for “Find what” and enter “CORRAF” for “Replace with” (“COTO” and “CORA” if using 4-letter codes instead of 6-letter codes).

 

4. If you used the “Nightly_Weather” R script for task a, then your meta.csv should already be uniquely named (same name as the project). If it is not uniquely named, rename the file using the project name (FBB_[YYYY]_[CNTY]_ [Company]_[Name-of-Project].csv).

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Rename acoustic files
metadata
Add weather parameters
Change "COTO"/"CORTOW" values
Rename "meta.csv"
Noise Files
Acquire meta.csv

Photo credit: Roxanne Pourshoustari

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