Data Management

These data are preliminary or provisional and are subject to revision. They are being provided to meet the need for timely best science. The data have not received final approval by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and are provided on the condition that neither the USGS nor the U.S. Government shall be held liable for any damages resulting from the authorized or unauthorized use of the data.

Data in RAFT have been passed through our QA/QC process for tags, receivers, and detections to ensure data and associated metadata completeness, remove duplicate entries, and verify location information.

Data users are cautioned to consider carefully the provisional nature of the information before using it. Please consider contacting the individual data contributors to understand the nuances of these data. More information can be found in our Terms and Conditions document. Information concerning the accuracy and appropriate uses of these data may be obtained by emailing RAFT@usgs.gov

As of 2024, RAFT is partnering with the Ocean Tracking Network (OTN) and is an official node of their system. As a result, we require that all data uploaded to projects are compatible with OTN’s metadata templates. You can download a 109 KB .zip file of our recommended templates with examples by clicking RAFT_Metadata_Templates_and_Examples.zip, and our Metadata Templates section further explains their usage. Once you have applied the templates to your data and uploaded it to your project, it will be reviewed by our Quality Assurance/Quality Control (QA/QC) team. If any issues are identified, you will receive an email requesting clarifications and/or notifying you of any changes that must be made. Once your data pass QA/QC it will be integrated into RAFT’s database and will be present in our downloadable data products via the website. If you have a data request outside of the scope of our current products, feel free to get in touch with us at RAFT@usgs.gov and we can work to get what you need. For further information on how the data in RAFT is used, please download a 282 KB .pdf of our Terms and Conditions.

To download a 109 KB .zip file of all recommended metadata templates for data submission (with examples), click the following link: RAFT_Metadata_Templates_and_Examples.zip
The following files can be extracted from the .zip file:

Each of these files can be downloaded separately by clicking on their name. Each file contains a Data Dictionary tab that explains each data field and its units and gives a detailed explanation of the file's usage. All required data columns are highlighted in green and have a * indicator, and all unhighlighted columns are optional. The two example files Example_RAFT_Receiver_Metadata_Format.xlsx and Example_RAFT_Tagging_Metadata_Format.xlsx contain a tab with the example data in the format previously accepted by RAFT for your comparison, but any data in this format will not be accepted. If you have difficulty completing any of these forms or have further questions, contact us at RAFT@usgs.gov

Receiver records are crucial to depict an accurate detection history of a fish. Receiver records are also the source of the most error due to small changes in station names, receiver swapping, or failure to record every time a receiver was handled, for example. Please pay close attention to all data you record to ensure the best receiver records are created.

Receiver metadata is formatted so that each row can be a complete, standalone record for a particular station that shows a deployment, removal, and download time. A record begins with a deployment time, a station name, and coordinates. Later, temporarily removing that receiver/station from the water to download the data would complete that initial deployment record after all necessary data is recorded. Then, if that receiver were placed back in the same station after download is complete, a new row should be started with a new deployment time and the rest of that row will be filled at the time of the next download.

Station names given to a receiver should be clear, concise, and should generally describe the location where it exists. No special characters in these station names. The only character accepted aside from letters, numbers, and spaces are underscores (_). For example, LockandDam19_Upstream_W_Wall.

In the metadata template for acoustic transmitters, there many columns, but only some of them are mandatory. The user is allowed to cut the template down to only what suits their individual needs, so long as the mandatory columns are kept and filled.

For fish with multiple “tags”, such as one internal acoustic transmitter and one external jaw tag and one external floy tag all on the same fish, it is required that each tag receives their own row of data for the same fish, and the ANIMAL_ID column be used to create one unique identifier to match all of the information from that one fish. It is recommended that this ANIMAL_ID be a combination of the acoustic transmitter ID and the date tagged, for example, A69-9001-60101-2022-04-19, and this ANIMAL_ID is consistent across each tag that a fish is marked with. All the fish measurements and pertinent information should be filled in for the row with the acoustic transmitter, and that information can be copied across the rows consisting of the external tag information.

Raw detection data should be downloaded from a receiver at least once a year. These data come in the form of a .vrl file when downloaded from a receiver using VUE software, or a .vdat file if using Fathom software. Further processing of these raw download files is not necessary, and these raw files can be submitted to the RAFT management team. Time corrections to fix a receiver's internal clock drift is no longer the responsibility of the person downloading the data, but rather, the RAFT management team automates a time correction during their QA/QC procedures before submitting your data to the database.