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CensusIO CensusIO Guide

Protocol binding

A survey type can declare its protocol: the survey design it follows, and therefore the estimate it is meant to produce. The four protocols are mark-recapture, removal / depletion, catch per unit effort, and disease surveillance.

What it does

Section titled “What it does”

When a survey type declares a protocol, the analysis page headlines that estimate. For example, a mark-recapture survey leads with its abundance estimate and confidence interval, so the number the survey exists to produce is the first thing you see.

The standard survey types in your starter library already declare the right protocol. For a custom survey type, the protocol is part of its definition (it can come from an AI draft, which knows the standard designs).

Reading the protocol cards

Section titled “Reading the protocol cards”
  • A protocol the survey declared leads the page with its headline result.
  • A protocol that was not declared but still ran (because the fields happened to support it) is shown with a “(detected)” note, so you know it was inferred.
  • A protocol that is declared but cannot be computed yet shows: “Declared protocol. No estimate yet; its fields may be missing, or the values collected did not support one.” That is a prompt to check the fields or the data, not an error.