To get started, you’ll want to set up your zoo. This is most easily done with the BlankZoo file rather than trying to overwrite the dozens of diets and hundreds of animals in the SampleZoo.

1. Make a copy of BlankZoo datafile (located in ZDN Support Files/Datafiles) and rename it to the name of your zoo
2. In ZDN > Settings, connect to your new datafile.
3. Under “Institution Setup”, go to “Edit Zoo Areas and Diet Groups“.
   • Parks Tab: Parks are physically separate facilities or sites. If your institution has multiple facilities, or if you as a nutritionist work at multiple facilities, set up each one as a separate park. This might align with your ZIMS facility names. If you only work at one facility or this is only one site, then just name one park and ignore the rest.
     • DO NOT DELETE the “none” line – keep that in there!
     • If you work with truly politically separate parks (i.e. maybe you are a consultant), you might start a separate datafile for each to keep them truly separate. However, this will also mean you will have to enter foods and nutrient analyses separately for each park, which can get quite tedious. Consider how politically sensitive diet data truly is for each institution and if they are okay with it, your life will probably be easier if you stick to one datafile with multiple parks.
   • Departments/Teams Tab: This is for each major division of each of your parks. Often this aligns with curators or other management divisions within your institution. Think big major divisions such as “Africa”, “Asia” or “Birds”, “Mammals”. Parks contain Departments.
   • Delivery Locations Tab: These are divisions within Departments that are more like animal areas/barns or other ways that diets are grouped together for specific locations within your park. Even if you don’t deliver diets, there might be other divisions of how diets are grouped within a department (diets go on shelves, diets go in certain buckets, diets go to certain refrigerators, etc.). Departments contain delivery locations.
4. Kitchen Prep Locations – these are most likely “diet books” for most zoos. If you have a centralized kitchen, then these might be books at each workstation. If you have satellite kitchens, then these might be books out in each animal barn. Either way, Prep Locations are “books” or physical places food is prepped. Some might be things like “Hay Barn”. There is an option to “Exclude from Prep Reports” if there are certain locations that you don’t want to print prep pages for for things that don’t normally show up in traditional books (supplements, browse, hay are common locations to exclude).
5. Containers – these are standard container sizes/types used in your food prep processes. This is optional – if you don’t want to specify that certain foods go in certain containers, you can ignore this section.
6. Users – this is self-managing. New users will be asked for their names when they first use the program. You do not need to manually add users.
7. Edit foods – this is where you can add new foods. For more details, see the Edit Foods article.
8. Edit Species – this is where you can add new species. ZIMS users – this should update automatically when you import animals from ZIMS. If you don’t use ZIMS, you will need to add species yourself. If you want images of your species to appear, place the images in the “ZDN Support Files/Images” folder and put the image name here. International users – you can add your own local names for species (do not change the ZIMS names) for species.