📚 Syllabus: Data Management with KoboToolbox
Overview
An experienced Indigenous user who is fluent in the use of multiple digital tools, including GPS units, GIS software, CoMapeo Desktop, KoboToolbox, etc. Capable of training others, performing data management tasks, and understanding the structure of the systems. May contribute to adapting workflows.
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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.
Introduction
This guide provides an overview of the AudioMoth sensor workflow. These
Guardian Connector is a free and open-source Indigenous data sovereignty platform for communities to securely centralize, access, and derive insights from their environmental and cultural data. Developed through collaboration between Indigenous communities, Conservation Metrics, and technical partners, Guardian Connector addresses the unique challenges faced by communities on the frontlines of protecting their territories.
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.
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.
Acoustic Sensors can have variable microphone quality depending on
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.
CoMapeo uses customizable categories (icons with names) to organize and visualize mapping data. Communities can adapt these to their specific monitoring needs and contexts.
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.
This page covers practical lessons learned from using KoboToolbox in real-world scenarios, including common pitfalls and their solutions.
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.
This section provides detailed reference documentation for common workflows when using Guardian Connector.
Guardian Connector serves as a centralized hub for collecting and aggregating data from multiple sources. By connecting to various data collection tools and platforms, Guardian Connector consolidates community-generated data into a unified database for streamlined management and access.
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.
Filebrowser is a web-based file manager that allows users to browse, upload, download, and share files from their Guardian Connector instance.
How do I use Guardian Connector?
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.
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.
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 Filebrowser).
The 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.
Understanding the diverse user personas who interact with Guardian Connector and their varying technical expertise levels
This information is adapted from “Technocultural Data Protocols” from Foster & Schonwetter 2024, produced for the Tenure Facility.
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.
Welcome to the Guardian Connector tutorials section! Here you'll find comprehensive, step-by-step guides designed to help Indigenous community organizations make the most of the integrated tools in the Guardian Connector ecosystem.
This reference section provides detailed technical information, specifications, and practical guidance to help you implement, configure, and use Guardian Connector effectively. Whether you're planning a deployment, integrating tools, or managing day-to-day operations, you'll find the comprehensive information you need here.
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.
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.
This document is your onboarding document to a fresh Guardian Connector instance.
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.
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.
📄 Academic Papers
Within the data ecosystem, there are many tools available for a variety of tasks. Throughout our own data journey, we’ve come across several that stand out as being particularly useful for common tasks and workflows.
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.
This guide describes how to prepare an AudioMoth sensor prior to field
For detailed instructions, see the Timelapse Template Guide.
AudioMoths can be configured with many different settings for different objectives. For comprehensive documentation please see the Operation Manual.
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.
Please see the Timelapse Metadata Guide for the most recent and accurate information
If sampling spans \>30 days (or the amount of time the sensor is
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.
CMI requires standardized metadata for each sensor deployment. Each row
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.
Files should be organized in a similar fashion to [camera trap
Export as CSV
Between: [Community or Organization Name]
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.
USB Cable Problems
How to manually send or retrieve a failed submission from KoboCollect
Compatibility with Browser Translation services
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.
Superset uses a role-based system to control what users can see and do within the platform. When users are approved for access to your Guardian Connector Superset instance, they are automatically assigned a default role that determines their permissions.
🎯 Objectives
🎯 Objectives
🎯 Objectives
🎯 Objectives
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: