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CensusIO CensusIO Guide

Locations

Your locations are a tree of the places your organization surveys: regions, drainages, waterbodies, and sites, plus management units. Building it once gives every record a real place to belong to.

The location tree A hierarchy of locations: a region (Grand Valley) contains a drainage, which contains a waterbody (Blue Mesa Reservoir), which contains sites (Reach 2, Reach 5). Records bind to a site or waterbody. LOCATION TREE Grand Valley region GV Gunnison drainage drainage HUC 14020002 Blue Mesa Reservoir waterbody BMR Reach 2 site BMR-02 Reach 5 site BMR-05
A hierarchy of regions, waterbodies, and sites. Each place has a type and a code; records bind to a site or waterbody.

Build the tree

Section titled “Build the tree”

Open Reference, then Locations. In the Location tree panel, choose + New to add a place. Pick its Type (region, drainage, waterbody, site, or management unit), give it a Code and a Name, and set it under a parent. Each type has its own details: a waterbody can carry its water type, reach codes, and a state, a site its agency code, a latitude and longitude, and a state, a drainage its HUC code. The state lets reports roll records up and filter by state. Choose Add location.

You can Edit a place, Deactivate one you no longer use, or Delete one that has no children and no records bound to it.

Import from a spreadsheet

Section titled “Import from a spreadsheet”

A program’s station list usually lives in a file already. In the Location tree panel, choose Import and pick a .csv, .xlsx, or .xls file. The first row must be column headers; the columns are code, name, type (region, drainage, waterbody, site, or mgmt_unit; site when left out), parent_code, lat, lon, and state. Common variants of these names are recognized (latitude, longitude, station_code, parent, province).

  • Put parent rows above their children; a parent_code can also name an existing location’s code.
  • The whole file is checked before anything is created: one bad row means nothing imports, and you get the row numbers with what to fix. Numeric codes are fine.
  • Up to 1,000 rows per file. Only organization-wide admins can import, since the location tree also bounds regional member scopes.

Browse and drill in

Section titled “Browse and drill in”

Open any place to see what is under it and the records collected there, with a breadcrumb back up the tree. The dashboard’s Browse by region panel is a fast way in, listing each region with its site and record counts.

Binding a record to a place

Section titled “Binding a record to a place”

When you enter a record, the Location picker offers your active sites and waterbodies (or No specific location for a point-only survey). Binding a record to a site is what lets CensusIO compare its GPS point against the expected place during review.