Ever submitted a survey and noticed it did not show up in your account right away? No worries — it takes several weeks, at least, for your surveys to appear in your survey log. Here's a breakdown of how it works.
Your surveys, once submitted, go into a “holding tank.” After a number of them accumulate within each region (TWA, PAC, HAW, etc.), they are gathered and formed into a batch for each region — there are often hundreds of individual surveys per batch — and moved into the error-checking phase of the process. Surveys are both computer and human error-checked, and we send “are you sure?” emails to individual surveyors when we have questions, especially when a sighting is the first record of a species in our database for a given area.
It often takes several weeks to confirm all of the flagged sightings. Once everything is confirmed, all surveys within the batch are processed through to completion.
So, don't be surprised when your data don't show up in your survey log right away. It typically takes 3–4 weeks from submission (and occasionally, even a bit longer than that). You can check the status of your submissions in the My Survey Log report on the REEF website, which has sections for “In Progress,” “Submitted but not yet in review,” “In review but not yet in database,” and “Processed and in database.”