Creating activities

Setting up an Activity

Activities on Nature Counts are a way of setting up forms and reports for particular sites or areas, and for particular species or groups of species. Have a look at the Activities pages to see the ones that have already been set up. Before setting up your own Activity it is worth searching through the list of existing ones to see if there is a suitable one already.

Select "Activities" from the main menu (you need to be logged in first):

Click on the "My activities" tab (if it is not already showing), and click on the blue button to "Create new activity". You should see a form headed "Create or edit an activity", and you can use this form to define what your Actitivity will do.

The basic details for your Activity

First of all, give your Activity a name and a description, so that it is clear for anyone visiting Nature Counts what the Activity is for. You need to choose an Activity type, whichever is most appropriate to your Activity:

If your Activity is associated with an organisation, you can upload a logo that will be displayed on the Activity pages. Click on Choose file and select an image with the file explorer that opens:

Who can join your activity?

The next question asks you to define how iRecord users can join your Activity (see also how this might affect the choices the section below about which records appear in the activity):

Here's a brief description of the options:

Anyone can join without needing approval: this means anyone who has created an account on Nature Counts can join this activity, submit records to this activity and view the associated activity pages. This activity will appear in the list of activities on the 'Browse all activities' tab. You might use this option for a wide scale event such as 30 days wild or a bioblitz.

Anyone can request to join but a group administrator must approve their membership: As above but users so choose to join this activity will need to be approved by a designated Activity admin. This activity will appear in the list of activities on the 'Browse all activities' tab. You might use this option for a group which encourages casual participants members and doesn't mind the activity appearing in the list of activity.

The group is closed and membership is by invite only: This activity will not appear in the list of activities on the 'Browse all activities' tab. People can join the activity by responding to an Activity invite or if the admin adds users manually.

Administrator will set up the members manually: This activity will not appear in the list of activities on the 'Browse all activities' tab. People can only join the activity if the admin adds users manually. You might use this for staff-only activities for tracking records from a particular project.

You also have the option here to select whether records which appear in the activity are full resolution. This means any participant of the activity can see sensitive species records at the resolution they were recorded at. Also, note that if you select Anyone can join without needing approval then this box cannot be ticked.

By default, one of the administrators for the Activity will be the Nature Counts account that was used to set up the Activity, but you can add further administrators if the Activity is being jointly run by several Nature Counts users. To find another person on Nature Counts you need to type in their name as "Surname, Forename", or you can search on Surname alone, or you can type in the full email address of the person you wish to add, and then click the "Add" button - if there is a matching Nature Counts account for that email the account will be added.

Note: all users must have already created a Nature Counts account to be able to be added to an activity.

You can see in this example Simon is a group administrator and another group member is being added by typing last name, first name. Selecting them on the list then clicking 'Add'.

Which records should appear in the Activity?

This section of the form works in a similar way to the filtering options elsewhere in iRecord. You can choose what species or species groups will be shown in your Activity, you can define a geographical area and you can select a time period. In addition, the "Advanced" section allows further filtering based on whether or not records have been verified, and what source they come from.

You can see that these filters are the same tools that appear on the explore page. See this help page for detailed documentation: https://sites.google.com/wildsheffield.com/nature-counts/records/exploring-data#h.pg36g41e2adb

Click on "What" to choose filters for species groups, or individual species, or at other taxonomic levels.

Click on "Where" to define the geographical area for your Activity. This can be taken from your existing list of sites (the ones that you have set up in "My Sites"), or from predefined lists of counties, countries and National Nature Reserves. Alternatively, you can define your own site boundary by using the map drawing tools - hover over the tools to see what they do:

Click on "When" to set a time period for the records that you want to display.

The "Quality" and "Source" filter settings can also be changed. By default, your Activity will include all records except those that have been flagged as incorrect, from all sources, but you can change these filter settings if you wish.

As well as the filter settings you chose in section , you can also choose how to relate the species and geographical filters to the members of the Activity.

The first and most restricted option will only display records that were added to Nature Counts by someone who is a member of the Activity group, AND who used one of the recording forms that you will define in the section below.
The second option will only display records that were added to Nature Counts by someone who is a member of the Activity group, but they could submit through an activity specific form, or through the generic 'Enter a casual records' form or 'Enter a list of records' form.
The third option will display the most complete set of records, showing all records that match the filters, regardless of whether the recorder is a member of the Activity, and regardless of which data entry form they use.

What web pages do you want your Activity to have?

This final section of the form is the one that set up the pages that Activity users will actually see, via the blue buttons that appear next to each Activity. You can choose whether to make the pages available to all Nature Counts users, or just to those that have joined the Activity, or just to Activity administrators.

Under the "Form" heading you can choose from a variety of predefined forms.

The general ones that are of more general use include:

Enter a casual record - similar to the standard Nature Counts form but filtered for the Activity

Enter a list of records (for a site on a date) - similar to the standard Nature Counts "enter a list" form, but is filtered to the species group and geographical area of the Activity

Import CSV spreadsheet (for a site on a date) - the same form as the staff only upload CSV page but is filtered to the species group and geographical area of the Activity

Explore activity records - similar to the standard Nature Counts "Explore records" page, but is also filtered to match the Activity

Activity summary - a useful view of what's been added to the Activity, with total numbers of records and species, what's trending etc.

You can see that other forms to do with the survey builder have also appeared in this list. When you create a custom survey form you can choose as to whether to make them available for activities. This is a good way of making survey forms available to non-staff (eg. volunteers).

You can add as many of the others as you need. You can click on the red ❌to remove a page.

Here are some examples of each of these pages:

Activity summary

Explore Activity records

Enter a casual record

Enter a list of records

Import CSV spreadsheet

Under the "Link caption" heading, you can add or change the text that will appear on the buttons for each page of your Activity. For example the settings on the left create the links on the right:

These settings...

...create these links

Under "Who can access this page?" you can choose whether to make your forms accessible to group members only, to group admininstrators only, or to all iRecord users. For instance, you might want to make the Activity summary available to all users, the Enter records form available only to group members, and the Manage sites form available only to group admins:

You can now click on "Create group" at the foot of the page to save your Activity!

Inviting participants

After creating your activity return to the 'My Activities' page.

Next to each activity in the 'Actions' column you can see symbols.

The ⛔ no entry symbol means you will leave the activity

the 📝notepad symbol is for editing the activity - this will take you to a similar page as when you were creating the activity.

The ✉ symbol with an envelope and a green arrow is for inviting people to your activity. Click on this symbol to invite people to Activity on this page:

The ⭐ star symbol will appear in activities you are not already a member

On this page you can add email addresses, one line at a time, for people you want to invite to the activity. You can then write a message then click 'Send Invites'.

Invitees will receive an email with a link to allow them to easily sign up. If your Activity has been set up so that new members have to be approved by Activity administrators, the admins will see that there is a membership application waiting to be dealt with next time they go to their "My Activities" list. Under the "Members" heading a blue "pending" link will be showing - click on the link to approve or reject the new member:

You can send more invites later by clicking the "Invite people to join" button in the Actions column in your list of My Activities.

In addition to the people you invite, anyone can ask to join an Activity by finding it in the "Browse all activities" tab (from the menu "Record - Activites"), and clicking on the yellow star button to join.

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