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How Fledermap is organized

Fledermap works with three separate places, each with a different role. Knowing which is which is what makes the setup settings (and what's safe to delete or move) make sense.

The archive: your recordings, untouched

The archive is your detector's own export folder — wherever it syncs its .wav files into. Fledermap only ever reads from it: it never moves, renames, or writes into a recording, or deletes one. Whatever backup story you already have for that folder (a phone/cloud sync, a manual copy) is still the only thing protecting those files — Fledermap doesn't add one.

The database: everything Fledermap has figured out

Every identification, session, and site Fledermap derives from your recordings lives in its PostgreSQL database — not in the archive itself. The database is where the actual value of a long-running install accumulates: your recordings are unchanging source material, but the database is what turns them into a map you can browse and correct over time (a manual species correction, a favourite, a session note).

The media root: fully regenerable

Spectrograms, oscillograms, and audio previews are rendered from the raw audio, then cached to disk under the media root so the map doesn't re-render them on every view. Unlike the archive or the database, this directory holds nothing that can't be recreated — deleting it and letting Fledermap re-render everything loses you nothing but some CPU time.

What actually happens when you add a recording

  1. Ingest reads new files from the archive, extracts their metadata (species codes, GPS position, timestamp), and computes an identity for each recording that survives a later on-device rename or re-export.
  2. Derive groups recordings into sessions (by detector and time gap) and clusters sessions into sites (by geographic proximity).
  3. Media rendering produces the spectrogram, oscillogram, and audio preview for the map and recording-detail pages to actually show.

fledermap worker runs all three stages on its own, continuously, once installed — see Set up Fledermap.