Uses

Over the years, many institutions have downloaded and used ZDN or its predecessor, the Animal Diet Database. No two institutions use the same set of features or use the product in the same way. Here are some examples of the most common scenarios:

Analysis Only

Many folks only use ZDN to calculate the nutrient composition of diets without any consideration/intention to use for kitchen operations. In this way it is similar to Zootrition, a professionally developed and supported software package many zoos have used.

Feed Setup

For this to be most effective, you will need to ensure the Foods are set up for your institution and have accurate analyses. Depending on the diversity of your animal collection and feeds used, this can be a considerable undertaking. Most institutions use hundreds, if not thousands of different feed items. This is an excellent project for an intern or student, and may initially take weeks or even months, depending on the number of feeds and whether samples need to be sent out for analysis. While ZDN contains some built-in data, it is mostly old, and likely does not reflect your feed items.

However, there is currently an import mechanism from DairyOne labs, which has been a great partner to zoos for many years. We are working on an importer for Midwest Labs, and eventually a more generic "from a spreadsheet" import feature.

Diet Setup

Even if you do not intend to use the kitchen/diet prep features of the system, it is still recommended to fill in some of that information in the Edit Diets screen. Specifically, be sure to fill in the following:

• Diet name (can be anything - animal house name, animal ID number, description). This is used in various reports and printing
• Target Taxa - this will help you distinguish similar diets from one another
• In the diet items section:
  • Feed (of course)
  • Amount and units
  • Daily schedule plus rotations if applicable. All of these are used to correctly convert the diet into "average daily g". For example, a food that is offered as 14 g every Monday would have an "average daily g" of 2 g per day, while a similar diet set to every other Monday (every 2 weeks) will have an "average daily g" of only 1 g per day.

Zoo Usage for Diet Record Keeping

Some folks use ZDN for zoos, but mostly as an application for the personal use of a nutritionist/vet/commissary manager and not as a live production system. In this case, there is more of an interest in looking at global reports such as feeding cost and ordering reports and printing (or PDF-ing) some diet cards for sharing with keepers or other institutions

Feed Setup

• Enter the cost-per-gram for each food into either the Settings > Edit Foods (1 food at a time) or the Settings > Edit Food Prices screens. This will generate the data you need for the Reports > Feeding Cost Reports reports to work correctly

Institution Setup

• You will likely want to set up your parks, areas, and delivery locations, even if you don't intend to really use them yet. This will help you print reports by area and use other features of the software.
  • Parks - these are physically distinct locations. Many zoos only have one location. Some, though, have a remote breeding facility, an off-site rehabilitation facility, a safari park, etc. Generally, the idea is that different parks will manage their own ordering and inventory.
  • Areas - these are generally "curatorial" divisions within your institution such as the Bird Team, the Primate Team, etc. Typically (but not always) under a common leader/supervisor/curator.
  • Delivery locations - these may or may not be related to any actual "deliveries", but merely is a way to group multiple diets that go to a common location together.
  • Parks contain Areas. Areas contain Delivery Locations.
• You probably will want to set up your logo in the Settings screen.

Diet Setup

• If you will be printing/PDF-ing diet cards, you will want to make sure you have several key items completed:
  • Animal areas - will populate the heading of the cards
  • Add animals/enclosures to diets. This requires first adding animals (via ZIMS import or manually) - this will add animals to the bottom of your diet cards
• You may wish to keep your notes about the diets in the Edit Diets > Notes and Goals tab. You may wish to record this information in your more global animal management system, though.
• If you want to maintain individual or herd diets, but provide keepers information for diet prep for an entire area (such as a mixed-species exhibit or aviary), consider creating Group Diets and sharing the group diet cards with the keepers.
• If you have a centralized food warehouse that sends out bulk foods to areas, you should group all of your diets into Groups. The warehouse can then use ZDN reports to prepare the bulk/Group diets, while the keepers can be provided the diet cards for the individual animals or herds.