The following terms are used to describe ecological data in the Codex platform.

Animal vs Individual¶

An animal is defined as a reported entity. It has not been assigned a identifying name, but it does have an associated time and place that it was seen. Conversely, an individual is defined as a known animal. This is an animal that, through manual processing or matching, has been given an identifying name. A major objective of the platform is to identify all reported animals, and curate the catalogue to get to an accurate census of the individuals.

Sighting¶

A sighting is defined as a place and time at which one or more animals were seen. Sightings are useful for learning social, environmental, and behavior information about the animals that were seen together. They also provide logical units for researchers to group pictures of the same animal with greater certainty because the pictures are known to have been taken of the same animals.