Research in de wild or on zoo animals often takes place from a place often visited by the animals, such a drinking spot. A stationary set-up in this case offers the posibility to use a desktop or laptop to observe the behavior. The Observer XT offers you the oppurtunity to score in the way suited to your research. Such as live or from recorded video files, using continuous or interval sampling. Or mix and match these methods to suit your research!

• Concentrate completely on the animals to be observed and logging their behaviors; The Observer XT automatically adds time stamps to the logged events.
• Code behaviors rapidly and automatically calculate statistics, such as the total time an animal spent resting. 
• Log behavior live or from previously recorded video files, using the sampling method of your choice; continuous or interval. 
• Playback those parts of the video in which a lot of behaviors occurred and refine or edit scored behaviors. 
• Select data for analysis in order to calculate statistics on certain observations, animals, or event types, not others. 

Introduction
A lot of research is done on the behavior of wild animals and zoo animals, but large exhibition areas can make it difficult to observe them. Observations often take place from a hut close to a drinking hole or a special building close to the animal enclosure in a zoo. Such observational facilities usually provide the space to use a desktop or laptop to score behaviors, or to set up a video camera to record behaviors and score the behaviors later.  The Observer® XT, in combination with our hardware, provides you with the perfect solution; whether you want to score animal behavior live, or from previously recorded video files, in their natural habitat, or in the zoo.

How it works
The flexibility of this solution allows you to set up your project according to the practical possibilities and objectives of your research. If you have the opportunity to set up a computer near the animal, you can score the behaviors live, as they occur. This is especially suitable in a situation where the animals are not very active or when you are only interested in a few behaviors. Live scoring also insures that you do not miss any events that influence the animal’s behavior, but that would not have been caught on camera.  

A second option is to record a video and use this video to score beha-viors later on. Offline scoring from a video file provides the possibility to playback the video and code missed behaviors or score some parts in more detail while playing the video at half speed. This method is very suitable when you are interested in a wide range of behaviors, when a lot of behaviors occur in a short period of time, or when you are observing animals in the wild. If your camera is connected to the computer, you can also use The Observer XT to score live and acquire video simultaneously, giving you the best of both methods. 

For both options, your experiment starts with designing a coding scheme (ethogram) on the computer running The Observer XT. This coding scheme contains each behavior and each individual animal you want to study, including their corresponding codes. After designing the coding scheme, you can immediately start observing and scoring behaviors. Scoring simply takes place by pressing the corresponding key of the keyboard or by clicking on the behavior in the coding scheme on the computer screen. You can even go back and adjust your coding scheme during scoring. While behaviors are scored, The Observer XT automatically adds time stamps to the logged behaviors.

After you have scored the behaviors, you can select data for analysis. The Observer XT features an easy-to-use data selection method that gives a clear view of which data is selected for analysis. Selections can be based on observations, animals, behaviors, or independent variables (such as age of the animal or observation site). Possible output includes frequencies and durations of behaviors. 

A lot of wildlife research projects focus on time budgets of a certain species in different habitats. Since observations often differ in time duration, the proportion of time allocated to each behavior as a function of the total observation time is often used. The Observer XT enables you to automatically calculate these proportions of time. This helps in answering research questions such as: ‘do wild elephants in savannas spent a higher percentage of time sand bathing than individuals in deserts’ or, ‘do captive leopards in traditional zoo enclosures spent a higher percentage of time pacing than individuals in enriched enclosures?’. If you want to take your analysis to the next level, export your data from The Observer XT and use Theme™ to discover patterns of repeating sequences in behavior.

The Observer XT is also very useful if your project involves multiple observers. It allows you to exclude observer bias by comparing observations of different observers and analyzing the differences. You can also set up a multiple coder station configuration. This allows you to let several observers score at the same time, using The Observer XT Coder Licenses. These are cost-effective and limit the use of The Observer XT program to scoring data and visualization only. After scoring, you can collect the observations in your main project with a full license of The Observer XT and perform data selection, analysis, and reliability analysis.