Apache Superset
Apache Superset is a modern, enterprise-ready business intelligence platform that provides rich data visualization and exploration capabilities. It supports a wide variety of visualizations, from simple to complex charts, and allows users to create interactive dashboards. Superset is designed to be intuitive for both technical and non-technical users, making it ideal for sharing insights across diverse stakeholder groups.
Appendix 1: Enabling Multiple Computers for Labeling
Large Timelapse projects often involve multiple site folders, each containing its own copy (“child set”) of the project database (.ddb). Timelapse allows you to check out subsets of a project, annotate them independently (on a different computer or user), and then merge the changes back into the primary database. This workflow helps teams scale up annotation across many sites or observers.
Appendix 1: Testing Acoustic Sensors
Acoustic Sensors can have variable microphone quality depending on
Appendix 2: Deleting Files and Data
Timelapse provides several tools for removing images, records, and associated metadata from a project. Deletions are permanent, so these tools should be used with care—especially when working in a shared or multi-annotator project.
Appendix 3: Exporting Images for GC Wildlife Viewer
See the GC Wildlife Viewer README for more information on how to export your Timelapse images for GC Wildlife Viewer, and how to deploy the app as part of a Guardian Connector CapRover instance.
AudioMoth: Bioacoustics Basics
This guide provides an overview of the AudioMoth sensor workflow. These
Available Category Collections
CoMapeo uses customizable categories (icons with names) to organize and visualize mapping data. Communities can adapt these to their specific monitoring needs and contexts.
Available Templates
This page provides links to XLSForm templates designed for common data collection objectives by Indigenous community organizations. These templates can be used in KoboToolbox, ODK Central, or any other XLSForm-compatible platform.
Best Practices and Usage Tips
This page covers practical lessons learned from using KoboToolbox in real-world scenarios, including common pitfalls and their solutions.
Camera Traps: Deployment and Collecting Data
Introduction
CoMapeo
CoMapeo is an offline-first mapping and data collection tool designed specifically for indigenous communities and grassroots organizations. Built with a focus on data sovereignty and community control, CoMapeo allows communities to map their territories, document environmental changes, and collect evidence of environmental impacts without relying on external internet infrastructure.
CoMapeo Camera Trap Deployment
This CoMapeo category set uses the column naming conventions recommended in the GBIF Camera Trap Guide.
Common Workflows
Reference information for common tasks that involve Guardian Connector and related tools.
Companion Applications
Documentation for external applications that are useful alongside Guardian Connector but are not themselves part of the Guardian Connector platform or directly integrated into it.
Core Integrations
Guardian Connector is designed to work closely with a small number of external applications that are commonly used within Indigenous community monitoring and data management workflows. These integrations allow data collected or processed in other tools to be brought into Guardian Connector for storage, management, analysis, visualization, and longer-term use.
Data Sharing Protocols Grounded in Indigenous Data Sovereignty
This guide establishes an overview, actionable steps, guiding questions, and a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) template to support the secure, ethical, and community-driven sharing of Indigenous and local community data.
Download all of your data
As part of our commitment to data sovereignty, Guardian Connector provides multiple ways for users to retrieve their project data at any time. This ensures you maintain full control over your data and can export it when needed.
File Browser
File Browser is a web-based file manager that allows users to browse, upload, download, and share files from their Guardian Connector instance.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is Guardian Connector open source?
From CoMapeo to Explorer
This guide is for Guardian Connector operators to be able to create a data workflow from CoMapeo to a GuardianConnector Explorer map and gallery views. This process starts with CoMapeo data collection and ends with a configurable map and gallery visualizations.
From KoboToolbox to Superset
This document describes how to download form submission data from KoboToolbox and visualize the data in Superset, using Windmill and the PostgreSQL data warehouse included in Guardian Connector.
From Mining Alerts to Drone Maps
Introduction
GBIF: Discovering and Publishing Biodiversity Records
GBIF — the Global Biodiversity Information Facility — is an international network and open-data infrastructure for biodiversity occurrence records. Museums, herbaria, government agencies, research projects, and citizen-science platforms publish datasets to GBIF so that anyone can search, map, and download information about where and when species have been documented around the world.
GC Dataset Importer
Upload a dataset file and turn it into a clean PostgreSQL table in your Guardian Connector data warehouse. The app guides you through naming the dataset, uploading a file, optionally tagging the data source, and finalizing the import. It also saves the original and transformed files to your deployment’s data lake (accessible via File Browser).
GC Explorer
Guardian Connector Explorer (GC Explorer) is a web-based data visualization tool that transforms your community's tabular data into interactive maps, galleries, and dashboards. Built specifically for Guardian Connector, it connects directly to your PostgreSQL database to display data collected from tools like CoMapeo, KoboToolbox, and other data collection platforms.
GC Landing Page
The Guardian Connector Landing Page is the home page for your community's Guardian Connector: the front door you arrive at after signing in. It brings everything together in one place, so you don't need to remember web addresses or hunt around for the right tool.
Guardian Connector "User Personas" Explained
Understanding the diverse user personas who interact with Guardian Connector and their varying technical expertise levels
Guiding Questions for Creating a Data Sharing Protocol
This information is adapted from “Technocultural Data Protocols” from Foster & Schonwetter 2024, produced for the Tenure Facility.
iNaturalist: Community Biodiversity Monitoring
iNaturalist is a free platform for recording and identifying plants, animals, fungi, and other organisms. Observations typically include a photo or sound, a date and location, and a species identification — either your own or one suggested and confirmed by the iNaturalist community.
Incidents
Incidents in GC Explorer let you group different alerts and secondary dataset observations together when they are about the same event on the ground.
Instructor's Guide
This guide is tailored to support facilitators running the weekly live sessions in the 4-week self-paced blended learning program. The aim is to ensure every participant—regardless of digital literacy—feels included, confident, and engaged.
Introduction
Welcome to the guides & tutorials section of the Guardian Connector documentation! This section provides comprehensive, step-by-step guidance to help Indigenous community organizations make the most of the tools and workflows available across the Guardian Connector ecosystem.
Introduction
This reference section documents the components, concepts, integrations, and technical conventions that make up Guardian Connector. It is intended as a place to look up how different parts of the platform work, how they relate to one another, and the terminology and structures used throughout the system.
KoboToolbox
KoboToolbox is a free, open-source suite of tools for mobile data collection. It allows users to build forms, collect data in the field using mobile devices, and analyze the collected data through web-based interfaces. Originally developed for humanitarian contexts, KoboToolbox excels at creating surveys, questionnaires, and data collection forms that work reliably in challenging environments with limited connectivity.
KoboToolbox: Data Management Syllabus
Overview
Local Contexts: Annotating Datasets with TK/BC Labels
Local Contexts Labels
Metabase
Metabase is an open-source business intelligence platform. You can use Metabase to ask questions about your data, or embed Metabase in your app to let your customers explore their data on their own.
Onboarding Template for Community Organizations
This is an onboarding template for a new Guardian Connector instance hosted by CMI on the guardianconnector.net domain, to be used together with community organizations that are new to Guardian Connector.
OpenRefine
OpenRefine is a free, open-source desktop application for cleaning, transforming, and enriching tabular data — often referred to as data wrangling. It offers powerful capabilities such as faceting, clustering, custom transformations, and integration with external sources (e.g., for reconciliation or geocoding). Unlike spreadsheets, OpenRefine applies operations across entire columns, and all steps are tracked and re-applied as reusable transformation recipes.
Preparing Mining Alert Field Briefings
Introduction
QGIS
QGIS is a powerful open-source application for working with geographic data, such as shapefiles, geopackages, data collected using CoMapeo, and other spatial data formats. It allows you to create, edit, and visualize maps in countless ways.
Reading List on Indigenous Data Sovereignty
📄 Academic Papers
Running, Scheduling, or Triggering Scripts and Flows
Always check the official source.
Sobre o Guardian Connector
O Guardian Connector é uma plataforma gratuita e de código aberto para a soberania de dados indígenas, que permite às comunidades centralizar, acessar e extrair informações de seus dados ambientais e culturais de forma segura. Desenvolvido por meio da colaboração entre comunidades indígenas, a Conservation Metrics e parceiros técnicos, o Guardian Connector aborda os desafios únicos enfrentados pelas comunidades na linha de frente da proteção de seus territórios.
Step 1: Organizing Imagery
It’s important that images are carefully organized. All images that are to be analyzed together, or your "image dataset", should have the same root folder and can be separated into sub-folders under the root. Below is a suggested folder structure, however it may vary depending on the setup of your project’s deployments and retrievals.
Step 1: Sensor Preparation
This guide describes how to prepare an AudioMoth sensor prior to field
Step 1: Set up a Local Contexts Hub Project and labels
Official onboarding for the Hub is documented by Local Contexts: Getting started on the Hub. The steps below are what Guardian Connector expects before you Fetch Labels from the Local Contexts Hub.
Step 1: Understand monitoring sessions, cameras, locations, and deployments
Before collecting any data, it is important to distinguish between four related concepts:
Step 2: Creating a Timelapse Template
For detailed instructions, see the Timelapse Template Guide.
Step 2: Fetch Labels from the Local Contexts Hub
After you have a Hub project and approved labels, use Windmill (which is that powers the GC Scripts Hub) to pull those labels into the data warehouse.
Step 2: Programming the AudioMoth
AudioMoths can be configured with many different settings for different objectives. For comprehensive documentation please see the Operation Manual.
Step 2: What information should be recorded?
GBIF recommends structuring camera trap data so that it can eventually be represented using Camtrap DP.
Step 3: Apply Local Contexts Labels to a dataset
Prerequisite: Labels must already exist in the data warehouse from the previous step, Fetch Labels from the Local Contexts Hub.
Step 3: Choosing a tool for deployment data collection
There is no single best application for every camera trap project.
Step 3: Sensor Deployment
AudioMoth sensors can be deployed like most other acoustic sensors, however, it is really important to remember to a) check that the audiomoth is correctly oriented in the case, and b) that the time is correctly set prior to deployment.
Step 3: Setting Up Folder-Level Metadata
Please see the Timelapse Metadata Guide for the most recent and accurate information
Step 4: Camera trap field protocol
A camera trap project works best when cameras are prepared, deployed, serviced, and retrieved in a consistent way.
Step 4: Checking Sensors & Redeploying
If sampling spans \>30 days (or the amount of time the sensor is
Step 4: Reviewing and Tagging Images
The process of reviewing and tagging photos will vary depending on your image dataset and project goals. The steps below outline a generalized workflow for tagging images.
Step 4: Using the Labels
After you apply Labels to a dataset, Guardian Connector stores the mapping in the data warehouse so other tools can treat Local Contexts as first-class metadata—not only inside Windmill.
Step 5: Deployment Information Requirements
CMI requires standardized metadata for each sensor deployment. Each row
Step 5: Organizing camera trap photos and videos
Camera trap media should be organized carefully as soon as SD cards are downloaded.
Step 5: Using Image Recognition
Please see the Timelapse Image Recognition Guide for the most recent and detailed information. Please also see the Timelapse image recognition page for a video tutorial and a practice image set.
Step 6: Data Transfer & Management
Files should be organized in a similar fashion to [camera trap
Step 6: Exporting Annotations
Export as CSV
Survey Design Best Practices
This page captures practical, field-tested guidance for designing robust XLSForms for use in KoboToolbox and ODK. The focus is on avoiding common pitfalls and reducing downstream data cleaning and analysis overhead.
Template: Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for Data Sharing
Between: [Community or Organization Name]
Timelapse
Timelapse is a specialized software tool designed for analyzing camera trap images and videos in wildlife research and conservation. It provides powerful features for organizing, viewing, and analyzing large collections of wildlife images, including species identification, behavior analysis, and temporal pattern recognition. Designed to be accessible to users without scientific expertise, Timelapse is particularly valuable for long-term wildlife monitoring studies and biodiversity assessments.
Timelapse: Setting up a Project for Camera Trap Annotation
Introduction
Troubleshooting & Common Pitfalls
USB Cable Problems
Troubleshooting Guide
How to manually send or retrieve a failed submission from KoboCollect
Troubleshooting Guide
Compatibility with Browser Translation services
Turning Monitoring Tracks into Round Reports
Introduction
Use your data in QGIS
QGIS is a powerful open-source GIS application that can work with spatial data from Guardian Connector. This guide shows you how to download your data and open it in QGIS for analysis and visualization.
Useful Superset Charts and Visualizations
Superset comes with many built-in chart types — bar charts, line charts, maps, big numbers, tables, and more. Most of the time, one of these standard charts is exactly what you need. But sometimes you want something different: a page of KPI cards, a formatted report, or a status board with your own colors and layout.
User Roles
Superset uses a role-based system to control what users can see and do within the platform. In Guardian Connector, those roles are not assigned inside Superset. They are kept in sync with each user's Guardian Connector role, which administrators manage from the Landing Page.
Week 1: Introduction to KoboToolbox
🎯 Objectives
Week 2: Managing Surveys and Data in KoboToolbox
🎯 Objectives
Week 3: Data Analysis and Visualization
🎯 Objectives
Week 4: Data Cleaning
🎯 Objectives
Week 5: Final Project
This week is designed to be a culmination of the skills and knowledge you've acquired throughout the program, allowing you to design and execute a complete survey project. Here’s a detailed breakdown of each component: