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Turning Monitoring Tracks into Round Reports

Introduction​

The field briefing guide plans the round; the drone guide closes distance without going. But when the team finally walks out with the briefing packet and comes back later, it carries something no planning document predicts: the effort it took. Kilometres covered, hills crossed, sites that turned out to be three river bends farther than the satellite made them look.

Right now that record usually lives in nothing but the observers' memory — information that never gets to the reports. Many teams already capture it without trying: using tools that track recording during the round. That track, processed the day the team gets home, produces two things the community should see:

  1. The effort surfaced — distance, days out, elevation climbed — so the council understands what monitoring actually costs, not just what it finds.
  2. The work backed up — proof, from the device's own timestamps, of which planned sites the team physically reached and spent time at.

This guide is for the same people as the briefing guide — monitoring leads who are comfortable with QGIS and GC Explorer. Everything works with any tool that records standard GPX tracks.

Step 1: While out — record so the track is usable later​

A track is only evidence if it connects people to places. Three habits during the round make Step 4 possible:

  • One track per team per day. Start recording in the morning, stop at the end of the day. Many short, cleanly-named files beat one three-day file: individual days can fail, be quoted, or be summed without editing anything.

Back home, export your track data, one file per day, and name for the round:

2026-09_jatapu-round_teamA_day1.gpx
2026-09_jatapu-round_teamA_day2.gpx
2026-09_jatapu-round_teamB_day1.gpx

Step 2: Come home — put the GPX files where the round lives​

The round folder from the briefing guide, plus one new directory:

2026-09_jatapu-round/
├── alerts/             # GeoJSON exported from GC Explorer (planned sites)
├── reference/          # rivers, villages
├── tracks/             # 🆕 the GPX files, one per team per day
├── round.qgz           # the QGIS project from the briefing stage
└── printed/            # briefing packet — and now, the round report

Do not move files out of this structure to "share them": the verification step compares tracks against the alert exports you already made, and both stay in the same folder. The GPX files are originals — never edit them; if a day's recording has to be trimmed, export the trim to a new file.

Do this within a day of returning

GPS memory is like a notebook left open: fine until you come back and it has changed. Phones get reset, apps get cleared, SD cards get reused. The tracks are the round's only automatic witness — archive them first, report later.

Step 3: Extract the effort numbers — in the browser, nothing uploaded​

For the headline numbers you do not need GIS at all. GeoDataTools runs a set of GPX utilities entirely in your browser — the file is parsed on your own machine and never uploaded to any server, which matters when a track reveals where your observers were, or where an active site is.

What you wantToolWhere it shows up
Total distance, climb, descentGPX Elevation Profile ViewerDistance + elevation gain/loss, plus a profile chart you can screenshot for the report
Moving vs stopped time, pace, average & max speedGPX Pace & Speed CalculatorTime actually spent moving, split by pace
View several tracks at once, inspect a segmentGPX Viewer, gpx.studioMultiple team tracks overlaid; select one stretch (e.g. between two sites) and read its stats

You can drop each day's file in, record the numbers in a simple table, and sum across teams and days:

Day/TeamDistanceMoving timeClimbAvg speed
Team A, day 114.2 km5 h 10 m310 m2.7 km/h
Team A, day 29.8 km3 h 40 m190 m2.7 km/h
Team B, day 122.1 km6 h 05 m60 m3.7 km/h
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The elevation chart from the first tool is the single best "effort" image for the council: a flat satellite route becomes a wall of climbs when printed at A4. Screenshot it once per day file; one or two go in the report.

Step 4: The one-page round report​

Everything above exists to fill one A4 page that goes back to the community after every round — same print conventions as the briefing packet (scale bar, north arrow, minimal legend), so the council reads the before and after of the same map.

ElementContent
HeaderRound name, dates, teams and observer names
The routeRound map with team tracks over the alert sites: reached sites highlighted, unreached greyed, legend distinguishing track / site / route
Effort boxTotal km · days out · elevation climbed · transport used — the numbers from Step 3
Findings tableOne row per site (below)
Elevation profileOne screenshot per day file, or the single hardest day

The findings table is the "backing" the council signs off on:

SitePlannedVisitedFindingAction proposed
A3 — upper bench✅✅ 14 Sep, 1 h 20 mAlert confirmed: active digging, 3 machinesIncident + report to authorities
B1 — oxbow✅✅ 15 SepNo activity; alert was a cloud artifactClose the alert
C2 — creek mouth✅❌Not reached: falls 2 km above, season too lateRe-attempt by boat in October

Read as a set, the page tells the council exactly what they need: we planned against your alerts, we reached almost all of it, here is what it cost to walk those rivers, and here is what each site was actually doing. It doubles as the appendix for funder reports — the same evidence, one level up.

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Add the verified findings back where they came from: record confirmed sites in a GC Explorer incident. The planning map, the route that walked it, and the conclusion then live on the same record.

Step 5: Archive the tracks — let the effort accumulate​

The per-round report answers "what did this round cost and find?". The year answers "what does monitoring cost in total?" — and only works if every round's tracks land in the same place:

  • Minimum: the round's folder on community storage, tracks never edited or deleted, same naming.
  • Better: Use the Guardian Connector dataset importer to upload your tracks and waypoints to your warehouse, so that you can show them in GC Explorer alongside the alerts.

Once rounds accumulate as data instead of files, a dashboad can be created to gather the cumulative report.

📚 Further reading​