Supporting Animal Welfare: Species360 makes it easier to share welfare program essentials at home and with other institutions

We are pleased to announce new features in the ZIMS for Care and Welfare module!

Thanks to feedback from members and animal welfare leadership at association partners EAZA, AZA, WAZA, and others, we have identified and implemented improvements that make it easier and faster to track animal welfare, model processes across institutions and regions, and share templates designed for each species.

1. ZIMS for Care and Welfare now allows you to share templates between institutions. This functionality was among our members’ most highly requested new features, and will help regions to standardize the data collection across different member institutions.

What is the impact? Regional associations, cross-institution research projects, and others can take advantage of the option to create a taxonomy-based template using locally created indicators – and then share the template globally.

For institutions that accept the template, ZIMS will auto-populate the animals of that taxa currently held by that institution onto the template. Once a template is accepted, it can also be cloned and implemented for other entities if desired.

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Here are some of the other recent enhancements to ZIMS for Care and Welfare:

2. Users now have the option to choose which identifiers are displayed on templates. Identifier selections are template-based and assigned to all animals on the template.
3. Also highly requested: When viewing the list of templates, there is a column to view the Last Assessed Date for each template. This will make it much easier for staff to keep track of when another assessment is due.
4. The Care and Welfare data export now includes animal weights, body condition score and health status for users with role rights for those record types.
5. There is now the option to clone a template from the Template list screen. This creates a copy of an existing template and then it can be edited as needed and applied to different entities.
6. Notes can now be written for specific indicators. If a note is recorded for a specific indicator, that note also automatically includes the recorded value. Notes are included in the Care and Welfare chart list view.
7. In the coming weeks, there will be an Institution Preference to display the Notes above in the animal’s husbandry record on the Notes & Observations tab. This will allow the notes to be included if sharing is enabled on an animal’s record. Institutions can turn the preference ‘On’ if they want those records displayed in the husbandry module and included in external sharing if that record is shared with another institution.

Go here to see more new features and changes in ZIMS for Husbandry, Medical, Animal Welfare, and Studbooks.