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Information about visiting Degree Confluences |
Definition
A trip to a degree confluence, documented for the project by submission of a
narrative and photos.
Success vs Incomplete
For your visit to be considered a success:
The regional coordinators, who process visit submissions, have the final say on whether, and how, visit submissions get posted on the website. This includes the decisions about the order of visit photos, whether to include or exclude some photos, the total number of photos for a visit, the narrative content, and whether the visit is categorized as "success" or "incomplete".
Visits that are submitted and which do not meet the criteria for success will be considered as incomplete, but will be posted to the site, provided photos and a narrative are available. This documents your effort, and also may provide potentially valuable information for those trying the next visit.
Flying over a confluence (e.g. plane, helicopter, ultralite) is not considered a successful visit. However, aerial photos, along with a narrative, will be posted as incomplete visits, because they are very useful for planning a ground-based visit. If you have taken aerial photos during your approach to, or departure from, a ground-based visit to the confluence, feel free to include them as part of your photo submissions.
Changes in the Visit status
The status of a visit may change in two cases. When you submit your visit, you
indicate whether it was a success. When the regional coordinator reviews your
submission, they may change a success to incomplete, if you failed to meet
the project's requirements for visit submissions. A visit that is active on the
site may subsequently be changed from successful to incomplete if information,
such as a visit by someone else, shows that your visit didn't meet the project's
requirements. An example of this is where the first visitor used the wrong datum
in their GPS when checking their location.
Letter to Landowners
We have a letter available you may find useful in explaining the confluence project
to land owners when you're asking permission to cross their land.
| Bahsa Indonesian | HTML | (translated by Klesti M.H. and Ellssa) | ||
| English | HTML | DOC | (written by John Kejr) | |
| French | HTML | (translated by Wallace McLean and Jerome Marot) | ||
| German | HTML | DOC | RTF | (translated by Ulrich Messerle) |
| Italian | HTML | DOC | (translated by Chiara Bersano Roach) | |
| Portuguese | DOC | (translated by Rodrigo Salomoni) | ||
| Simplified Chinese | DOC | (translated by Xu Changjiang) | ||
| Spanish | HTML | DOC | (translated by Luis Felipe Trigo Boix) |
Confluence Hunting Checklists
We have two checklists:
Note: These requirements are applied to all visits made on or after August 15, 2003.
Photo images that you upload during your visit submission must meet or exceed a resolution of 600 by 400 pixels (or 400 by 600), with a 16-bit or greater color depth. This applies whether you are using a digital camera, scans of pictures from a film camera, or frame captures from a video camera.
If required, we will automatically reduce images you submit to us when we process your confluence visit submission, so we want you to submit "full sized" images, subject to our maximum file size limitation, which is 12 megabytes per file.
Unless you possess an advanced GPS, you typically can't achieve better than around 5 meter accuracy, so pinpointing the confluence spot with personal items is not very meaningful, and introduces elements that are not normally at the confluence.
Try to give in your pictures the same impression you got when you were there. It is optional to take a picture of the GPS reading the confluence location. Taking a picture of the GPS may be easier if you place it on the ground.
We prefer you do not annotate the photos of the confluence. This includes adding a mark or arrow to indicate the confluence location, and any text, including date/time stamps. It is allowed to indicate the compass directions on a panorama photo.
Note: These requirements are applied to all visits made on or after September 15, 2009.
When you submit your visit, you must supply a narrative. The narrative's content is up to you, however, there are some minimum requirements.
You are welcome to submit your narrative in your native language. If possible, please also provide an English translation of your narrative. If you cannot provide an English translation, we may be able to translate the narrative for you. Your visit will not be posted on our site until we have an English version of your narrative.
The narrative may contain links to off-site web pages related to your visit, however, that is not a substitute for submitting a proper narrative to our website.
As mentioned on our Confluence Hunting Checklist, you should prepare your narrative before you start your visit submission.
Your narrative should have breaks between paragraphs. At a minimum, that can be a blank line. It helps the regional coordinators with the processing of your narrative if you use HTML paragraph tags to indicate your paragraphs, as explained on the How to use HTML in visit narratives page.
Once you have composed your narrative, it is preferred if you save it as "plain text". You can then 'cut and paste' this plain text into the webpage form during the process of submitting your visit. This avoids problems caused by word processors such as Microsoft Word using features such as smart quotes, which may not appear properly on the web for all people.
It is a good idea to do a 'spell check' on your narrative before submitting it.
Submitting a Visit
For a complete step-by-step example of how to submit your confluence visit see our
How to submit a confluence visit page.
When you have made a visit, you should record that on the site by creating a "visited but not submitted" plan which you can do after creating an account or logging in to your existing account.
You should not submit your visit until you have both the narrative and photos ready. The narrative should be checked for spelling mistakes, and should have breaks between paragraphs. Photos should be checked, and if necessary cropped(e.g. if not scanned properly) or rotated(e.g. so your GPS photo isn't sideways). Once you are ready, log in to your account, and follow the directions on the submission form.
During the submission process, the status of your visit is "submitting". Once you have submitted the information such as the narrative, and have uploaded the photos, you should go to your member page and use the "Preview" option to get an idea of how your submission will look. You can then use the "Edit" option to go through the submission pages again to make any changes or corrections. At the end of this, make sure to use the "Finalize" button, which will change the status of your visit to "pending", and will send an email to the regional coordinator to notify them that your visit submission is ready to be processed.
Regional coordinators process visit submissions, reviewing them to make sure they meet the project's requirements, add HTML to format the narrative, process the photos to meet our size requirements and to generate the thumbnail images, and then make the visit "active" so it appears on the website.
If your initial visit submission is not complete (e.g. missing the narrative, or some or all of the photos) and you do not complete it within six months, your visit will be removed from the website. You can resubmit the visit when you have all your materials ready.