Skip to content
finwave Docs

Individuals

What you’ll learn

Section titled “What you’ll learn”
  • What an individual represents in finwave
  • How individuals are identified and cataloged
  • What attributes are tracked for each individual
  • How alternative IDs work

What is an individual?

Section titled “What is an individual?”

An individual in finwave represents a single identified animal in a population’s catalog. Each individual has a unique identifier and a profile that accumulates sighting history, demographic data, and photographs over time.

Individuals are the core of photo-identification research. The goal of the annotation workflow is to link observations (annotations on encounter photos) to individuals, building up each animal’s sighting history.

Individual attributes

Section titled “Individual attributes”

Each individual can have the following attributes:

  • Identifier — the primary ID code used by the research team (e.g., “HW-001”, “DN-042”)
  • Alternative IDs — additional identifiers used by other organizations or studies, displayed as “Main ID / Alt ID 1 / Alt ID 2”
  • Nickname — an optional friendly name
  • Sex — male, female, or unknown
  • Age class — the current life stage (e.g., calf, juvenile, sub-adult, adult), based on the population’s cohort definitions
  • Date of birth — if known
  • Date of death — if known
  • Notes — free-text notes
  • Profile image — a representative photograph (set by Professionals or Administrators)

Creating individuals

Section titled “Creating individuals”

Population administrators can create individuals through the population settings interface. At minimum, an identifier must be provided. Other attributes can be added at creation time or updated later.

Alternative IDs

Section titled “Alternative IDs”

Different research groups often use different naming conventions for the same individuals. finwave supports alternative IDs to bridge these naming systems. Administrators can add one or more alternative IDs to any individual, and these are displayed alongside the primary identifier throughout the interface.

This is especially useful when multiple organizations contribute to the same population and have historically used different catalogs.

Sighting history

Section titled “Sighting history”

Each time an individual is identified in an encounter (via a confirmed annotation), a sighting record is created. Over time, this builds up the individual’s sighting history — a chronological record of when and where the animal was observed. This history is the foundation for analyses like discovery curves and capture history matrices.

Section titled “Related”