The split between "Scoop net — stand" and "Scoop net — not stand" is not a bureaucratic distinction. It represents two different catch efficiency profiles, and collapsing them into a single count number ruins the ability to calculate meaningful CPUE across surveys run by different teams with different access to stand infrastructure.
What the Multi-Year Dataset Needs on Day One
Galaxiidae population surveys generate data that is only useful in the aggregate. A single survey event gives you a number — fish counted, nets deployed. A three-year dataset gives you a trend line. The problem is that a trend line built from inconsistently structured data is worse than no trend line, because it gives false confidence in a direction that may be entirely explained by methodological variance.
The fields in this template were designed with that multi-year view already embedded. Tide direction, tide type, tidal heights, the three rainfall windows — these are not nice-to-have annotations. They are the environmental covariates that allow you to separate signal from noise in a Galaxiidae abundance dataset. A neap tide survey in a dry week and a spring tide survey after 40mm of rain in 72 hours are not directly comparable observations. Without those fields populated consistently, you cannot make that correction, and your abundance estimate is confounded from the start.
The Environmental Fields in Detail
The weather and rainfall section is doing more work than it appears. "% cloud cover" as an integer field rather than a categorical ("overcast / partly cloudy / clear") is a deliberate choice — it forces a numeric estimate that can be binned later rather than forcing a categorical choice that loses resolution. Cloud cover matters for fish visibility and predation pressure during daylight surveys. Capturing it as a number preserves analytical flexibility.
Rain 24hr, Rain 48hr, and Rain 72hr are logged as text fields. This is correct. A numeric field would invite entries like "14" with no unit or source, and you would not know if that was millimeters from a nearby gauge or a rough estimate. Text fields allow the surveyor to write "12mm, Okarito gauge" — provenance attached to the number. For fisheries data that may be used in regulatory reporting or iwi resource management assessments, that provenance is not optional.
The Start Point and End Point location fields use GPS coordinates captured at the time of the survey. This matters more than it sounds. River reaches shift. Gravel bars move. A transect defined only by narrative description — "the section below the second bridge" — becomes ambiguous after a flood event that moves the channel. Coordinate-anchored endpoints let you verify, season over season, that your survey reach is actually the same stretch of river.
From Survey to Spatial Analysis
At twenty or thirty records, the Reason field and the geospatial endpoints become the basis of a defensible survey program description. You can demonstrate to regional councils that your monitoring sites are consistent, your reasons for each survey event are documented, and your methodology was standardized across teams. That documentation supports consent applications and population recovery reporting in ways that annotated field notebooks simply cannot.
The net type breakdown — Scoop, Box, Sock, Drag — by platform type gives enough resolution to calculate method-adjusted catch rates. When a new volunteer team deploys more sock nets from shore instead of the established box-net-from-stand methodology, the variance shows up in the data as a field difference rather than contaminating the trend signal.