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Populations

What you’ll learn

Section titled “What you’ll learn”
  • What a population represents in finwave
  • How populations are created and managed
  • How population membership works
  • How populations relate to organizations and encounters

What is a population?

Section titled “What is a population?”

A population in finwave represents a defined group of individuals of a species that researchers study and track over time. It is the primary organizational unit for all data — encounters, individuals, annotations, and analyses are all scoped to a population.

A population typically corresponds to a real-world study population: bottlenose dolphins in a specific bay, humpback whales in a breeding ground, or orcas in a particular region. The population defines the species, the geographic scope, and the catalog of known individuals.

Creating a population

Section titled “Creating a population”

Any registered user can request to create a new population. The request includes basic information about the species, location, and purpose of the study. A system administrator reviews and approves the request.

Once approved, the requesting user becomes the population’s first administrator and can begin configuring settings, inviting members, and uploading data.

Joining a population

Section titled “Joining a population”

Populations can be configured with different join policies:

  • Open — any user can join directly
  • Request-based — users submit a join request that must be approved by a population administrator

Population administrators can also directly invite users and assign them a role.

Population membership and roles

Section titled “Population membership and roles”

Every member of a population has one of four roles: Viewer, Expert, Professional, or Population Administrator. These roles determine what the member can see and do within the population. See Roles & Permissions for the full breakdown.

Population settings

Section titled “Population settings”

Population administrators configure the population through the settings interface, which includes modules for general settings, individuals management, ML configuration, data access, public pages, community management, and more. See Population Settings for a full guide.

How populations connect to the rest of finwave

Section titled “How populations connect to the rest of finwave”
  • Encounters are submitted to a population and contain the raw photographic observations
  • Individuals are cataloged within a population and identified across encounters
  • Organizations contribute data to populations but are managed independently
  • Analyses (discovery curves, composition breakdowns, capture histories, social networks) are all scoped to a single population
  • ML models are trained and evaluated per population
Section titled “Related”