UTC offset and time shifts

[Lilly F]

Hello everyone,
we have some problems with the start and end time of the deployments.
We are in the time zone of Central European Time, the camera traps are set to „wintertime“ (UTC +1) and the UTC offset in Agouti is set to “+01:00 – Brussels, Copenhagen, Madrid, Paris“.

The start and end time of the uploaded deployments is per se +1 hour compared to the time on the protocol (= time on camera). Unless the start time of the deployment is during summertime (UTC +2), then in agouti the start time is +2 hour compared to the protocol.
We thought the UTC offset of “+01:00” would be the correct one to choose since that equals our time zone. But colleagues of ours chose the UTC offset “±00:00“ and have the same time shifts in Agouti as we have.

So our questions are:
1. What exactly does the UTC offset do?
2. What data is the UTC offset affecting (start/end time, exported data)?
3. Does Agouti, and if so how, incorporate the time shift from summer- (UTC +2) to wintertime (UTC +1) and back?

Best
Lilly

[Oliver Keuling]

And: we do only work with "normal time". Thus we do not need a automatisch setting to summertime! Does biologically make nearly no sense. 

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[agouti]

We’ve received a few comments that the UTC offset is confusing. I agree.

 

Currently, the UTC offset should basically work as a time shift. For example, if your camera was set to GMT+1 and the UTC offset to +01:00 all timestamp for that deployment in the output should be the original timestamp + one hour. The rationale behind this is that such an offset would allow for easily correcting a wrong camera setting. For example, accidentally using summer time when your project is actually using winter time throughout the year.

 

For now, I recommend setting all your deployments to an UTC offset of +00:00. That should output all timestamp unchanged. We can do that in one go for all your deployments if you like.

 

We don’t currently do anything with actual timezones and daylight saving time. It’s on our list, but complicated stuff. Any ideas on how to implement this are most welcome. Perhaps we need two options? A time shift to correct wrong camera time settings at the deployment level and a time zone field?

 

Best,

Yorick

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[Lilly F]

To our knowledge, setting the offset to +00:00 does not solve our problem, as colleagues of ours used this offset and also have + 1h timeshifts on all their deployments. We also tried changing the default UTC offset to +00:00 for the last deployments before uploading them, but the extra hour was still added to each deployment.
So sadly this does not seem to be the solution..


Best,
Lilly