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.