The Mammal Society

For Evidence Based Conservation

 

Ecobat Troubleshooting

Please note: Ecobat is currently offline for essential maintenance. Please keep checking the Ecobat webpage for further updates. We apologise for any inconvenience caused. 

For urgent enquiries, please contact Emily at app@themammalsociety.org. 

The new Ecobat is now available here.

Please go through the following troubleshooting information before contacting us with a problem. This ensures that our Data and Information Officer can deal with any issues that are not solved by the following steps as quickly as possible. Thank you!

Troubleshooting on ecobat.org.uk

 

I can’t upload my proforma

  • Make sure you are uploading a file in the “.csv” format. Example: your file should read: “example.csv”
  • The type of .csv should be a normal “Comma-separated Vales .csv” file, please do not upload: CSV UTF-8 or MS-Dos files.
  • The maximum file size for uploading a proforma is 50 MB. If your file is over this, email us on app@themammalsociety.org when you get to this stage and we will run it locally for you.

Upload checklist, please make sure you address the following points BEFORE uploading your proforma:

  • Are your columns the same as in the proforma you downloaded? Make sure none of the column names have changed e.g. typos or data values ending up as column headers.
  • Check for lats and lons being in the wrong columns – sometimes when copying to multiple cells, these switch over and users have latitudes in their longitudes columns and vice versa.
  • Are all latitudes to same number of decimal places? (and same for longitudes) – If your latitudes have a different number of decimal places to your longitudes this should not be an issue however an issue can occur if their is variation within the column, for example, some of your latitudes are to 4 decimal places and others to 5. Go through and make sure your decimal places are all the same within columns. If the decimal places vary your data may be split into multiple locations for what is actually the same site e.g. a smaller number of passes between two locations rather than more passes at one.
  • Check your dates  – are your dates written in the format dd/mm/yyyy
  • Check your times  – for within night proformas, make sure your times have copied over correctly. They must be written as hh:mm:ss and the hour value must be from 00 to 23 and minutes and seconds from 00 to 59. Sometimes when exporting data from software this two points can be affected. 
  • Change your passes column to number – this column can be automatically classified as General, change the classification of the column to Number and then change back to 0 decimal places. 
  • All optional column numbers should be integers – for example height of detector, temperature, wind speed, should all be written as whole numbers with no decimal places.
  • Don’t include units – as for the above point, these columns should not include units of measurement, for example: detector height is 2, it should not be 2m, 2 metres or 2.2.
  • Make sure columns are matched to reflect where data is – when you upload your proforma, you will be prompted to match columns to what Ecobat recognises them as. Make sure you match all the columns to their corresponding Ecobat column. This includes putting Not Imported for columns with no data. Ecobat will auto-fill a lot of the columns for you to save time HOWEVER, if any of the columns don’t actually have any data in, for example you have not included temperature, then you need to change temperature back to Not Imported. Otherwise Ecobat is looking for data where there isn’t any.

There is a mistake in my data can I reupload it?

Uploading data that you have already added to Ecobat causes data in the system to be duplicated so it is important that if your data does indeed need to be reuploaded that you contact us before doing anything, please state what your user identifier for that dataset was when you received your receipt, please also explain to us what the mistake is.

Please note we are no longer able to remove data from the Per Night App on ecobat.org.uk. Please be very careful when uploading your data that it is correct.

I’ve tried to run my report but it won’t download/it says disconnected from server

Firstly make sure your file is under 50 MB. If it is over this amount then you will need to email us on app@themammalsociety.org to run it manually for you. 

When the app says ‘disconnected from server’ this can be from a number of issues. Sometimes it occurs when a large number of users are trying to use the app at the same time. If you encounter this error try again at another time to see if the server is quieter.

If it continues to say server disconnected, it is likely that something is wrong with the .csv file and how it interacts with the app’s code. 

First: check your .csv file for errors. The most common issue will be with the date or time column, if there were any errors here in the proforma stage, they will be amplified in the download.csv. Make sure all the dates are in the correct dd/mm/yyyy format and that time is as hh:mm:ss. Also make sure that the hour value is from 00 to 23 and minutes and seconds are from 00 to 59. 

If it all looks fine and it still won’t work, please contact us.