1. Reporting Animal Observations
Training Materials
Reporting Animal Observations
This mini-presentation will guide you through the steps of recording your observations of animals at your site. There is a separate training presentation for reporting plant observations at your site, however, many of the steps overlap. If you are observing both plants and animals at your site, you may wish to also view the presentation on reporting plant observations.
This information is also available on USA-NPN website at

2. www.usanpn.org/participate/guidelines Select a site
Select plant and animal species
Select individual plants
Mark your site and plants
Record your observations of animals
Record your observations of plants
Report your data online
In this presentation, we’ll focus reporting your observations online using Nature’s Notebook. 2

3.
A link to the Nature’s Notebook online interface is located in the upper right corner on all pages of the USA-NPN website, at

4.
You can also use the “Log in” button to log into your Nature’s Notebook account from any page on the USA-NPN website.

5. The first time you visit the Nature’s Notebook online data entry system, you’ll need to register yourself. To create a new account, click the “Create new account” tab on the User account page.

6. Enter a username and email address
Enter a username and address. You can use your address as your username.

7. Then fill out the participant information – your name and address
Then fill out the participant information – your name and address. All the fields marked with a red asterisk are required.

8. If you are observing as part of a partner organization, select the organization’s name in the Partner Organization drop down.

9. If you would like to participate in the USA-NPN cloned plants project and monitor a cloned lilac or dogwood, you can request one from the program coordinator.

10.
You can learn more about the cloned plants project at

11. Finally, answer the validation question, and click the “Create new account” button.

12. Once you are logged into Nature’s Notebook, you will have dashboard that looks like this.

13. Click on “Nature’s Notebook” on the left-side menu.

14. This will bring you to your Nature’s Notebook home page
This will bring you to your Nature’s Notebook home page. Using the navigation at the top, you can…

15. Use the “Nature’s Notebook Home” to return to this page. You can also…

16. Add a new site,

17. Add new plants,

18. Add animals to your checklist,

19. And enter observations.
Note that at the moment, the options to add plants, add animals, and enter observations are not available to me. That is because I haven’t yet registered a site. Once you have registered a site, you can then add plants and animals to it and then submit observations.

20. Let’s add a site now.

21. When you ‘add a new site’ you…

22. … first enter the name of the site – like ‘my backyard’ or ‘Bear Mountain trailhead’. Then, there are three ways you can enter location information for your site –

23. …by adding an address, which will be automatically geo-located on the map,…

24. …by selecting your site on the map, …

25. …or by typing the latitude and longitude into the boxes below the map.

26. Note the help icon on all of these pages.

27. We also encourage you to provide additional site information.

28. Please note the separate tabs, separating site questions that are specific to whether you are observing plants

29. Or animals.

30. After you have filled your answers to the site questions, click the “Create site” button to create your new site and return to the home page.

31. You should see notification that your site was successfully added to your account.

32. If you return to your home page, by clicking “Nature’s Notebook Home” on the top left navigation,

33. You will see that your site now appears in your list of “My Sites”
You will see that your site now appears in your list of “My Sites”. You can now add plants or animals to your site.

34. You can add animals to your checklist by clicking on “Add or Edit Animal Checklist” in the process navigation at the top of the page , or…

35. By clicking on the “Add or Edit Animal Checklist” button below “My Plants & Animals”.

36. Clicking either of these “Add or Edit Animal Checklist” buttons will take you to the “Animal Checklist” page.

37. You can select the site for which you would like to create or edit your animal checklist

38. And you can filter the list of animals by state, taxonomic group and monitoring network.

39. The list of available animal species are listed in the left window,

40. And your checklist for your site appears on the right.

41. You can add animals to your checklist by highlighting them in the “Species Available” window on the left, and then clicking the “Add to Checklist” button.

42. Now I have added American goldfinch, American robin, and American toad to my site that I called “My Back Yard”.

43. Once you are finished adding animals to your checklist, click the “Save checklist” button. Also be sure to save your checklist before you change any filter choices.

44. You should see notification that your checklist was successfully saved to your site.

45. The three animals I registered show up under “My Plants & Animals” in my Nature’s Notebook Home

46. For the site I called “My Back Yard”.

47. Because I already also registered a plant that I called “red maple-1” to my site called “My Back Yard”, it shows up in the “My Plants & Animals” list as well. Please see presentation 8, “Reporting Plant Observations”, for more details about adding plants.

48. From here, you can quickly return to the species profile page for any of the species on your checklist, to review the phenophases you are asked to observe.

49. You can also create a datasheet packet
You can also create a datasheet packet. A datasheet packet includes a phenophase datasheet for every plant and animal you have registered for your site, a cover sheet, and an animal checklist, if you are observing animals. After clicking on “Create Datasheets” you will be asked which datasheets you wish to print.

50. To create a full datasheet packet click on “Create All Datasheets”

51. Then click “Create Datasheets” to create your PDF datasheet packet
You will want to click this button to create the files, and then print them before going out into the field for the first time to ensure you have all of the datasheets you will need.

52. Clicking on the “Create Datasheets” button, then selecting “Create all datasheets”, provided me with copies of a Cover Sheet, an Animal Checklist, and a Phenophase Datasheet for each animal on my checklist. Because I have also registered a plant (in this case, a red maple), to this site, my packet also includes a Phenophase Datasheet for the maple.

53. Here is a copy of my datasheet for the American toad that I added to my checklist. Note that

54. you will need to fill in Species name,

55. Site name,

56. Year,

57. And your name.

58. Use this datasheet to record your observations when you see or hear a goldfinch in your site when you are observing. We recommend taking both the datasheet and a print out of the full phenophase descriptions when you go outside. You may collect weeks or months of data on the datasheet and submit it all at once, or submit each day’s worth of observations online as you progress through the season. However, the sooner you enter your data online, the sooner you and others will see your data in our online visualization tools.

59. When you fill up your phenophase datasheets for any of the species on your checklist, you can create and print more individual datasheets using the “Create Single Datasheet” button.

60. You can also create individual Cover Sheets using the “Create Datasheets” button

61. and selecting “Create cover sheet”.

62. or you can create additional Animal Checklists by selecting the “Create Animal Checklist” box.

63. Once you’re ready to submit observations online,

64. click the “Enter Observation Data” button.

65. You will be taken to the “Enter Observations” form.

66. The animal species listed on your checklist will appear in expandable menus. If you click on an animal name here,

67. You will be provided with the data entry table for this animal, in this case, American Toad.

68. Each column represents a day’s worth of observations.

69. You can hover over the phenophase name (adults feeding, for example) to review the detailed definition of the phenophase.

70. To enter a day’s worth of observations, click the calendar icon at the top of the column to choose the date of the observations you want to enter.

71. And choose the date you made your observations

72. Next, click “Y” for any phenophase for which you heard or saw the animal species, and “N” for those that you did not. Click “?” for any phenophases you were uncertain of seeing or hearing. Do not click any of the choices for a phenophase if you did not look or listen for it.

73. For those Phenophases that you did see or hear you will be asked to give abundance or intensity estimations. For example, if I saw one American toad adult on land feeding, two adults in the water, and also heard many overlapping calls that I recognized as American toad calls, I will click “Y” for ‘adults on land’

74. And type “1” in the “How many?” box

75. Click “Y” for ‘adults in water’

76. And type “2” in the “How many?” box

77. I will click “Y” for ‘adults feeding’

78. And type “1” in the “How many. ” box
And type “1” in the “How many?” box. This was the same one I saw on land, but both phenophases apply to that individual animal.

79. I will click “Y” for ‘vocalizing’

80. And then select an option from the “What value
And then select an option from the “What value?” drop-down menu, in this case ‘overlapping calls’. If you hover over the blue information icon to the left of the menu, you will see more detailed information for the available options.

81. If you heard overlapping calls that you suspected where from the American toad but you were not sure, you should instead click “?” and choose “overlapping calls” from the menu. If you learn in the future that the calls you heard on this date were definitely from the American toad, you can come back to this column and click “Y” for the phenophase and resubmit your observation for this date.

82. I did not see any toads mating so I will click “N” for this phenophase

83. Nor did I see any dead toads
Nor did I see any dead toads. If you click “N” for a phenophase, do not type or choose anything for abundance or intensity for that phenophase.

84. You can add comments if you have one that pertains to the species on that day – for example, that you saw a very large number of these animals, or something appeared extraordinary about what you saw.

85. On many dates you may not hear or see the species at all, so if you would like to enter “N” for all phenophases for this animal on this date, click “circle all no” at the top of the column.

86. This will quickly set all of your observations to “no” for this species on this date. If you did not check for one of these phenophases, you can click on the circled choice and it will be unselected. You might want to do this if, for instance, you hear frog or bird calls at your site but you do not know how to identify which species the calls are coming from. Since you have opted to ignore them and not even bother to figure out which species they come from, you should leave all choices uncircled, indicating you did not check for that phenophase.

87. Use the arrows at the bottom to scroll back and forth through time
Use the arrows at the bottom to scroll back and forth through time. You can edit your previous observations this way, if you need to make changes.

88. Once you have entered all of your observations, you can click the “Submit observations” button.

89. This will save your data
This will save your data. You should see a message that your observations were successfully saved.

90. From here, you can enter further observations, or use the navigation controls at the top of the page to other functions within Nature’s Notebook.

91. Please note the Help icon that is available on every page to help you in case you get stuck.

92. This concludes our presentation on reporting your observations of animal phenology. Thank you for your time and interest in our program!