When I search for detections of a particular tag on the motus website interface, how does the information provided map to what might have happened in reality? For example, if a tagged animal was detected, but then left the are for an hour and then came back, would that show up on the interface as 2 separate detections? How much time has to elapse before the detections are considered distinct?
My understanding of your question is that you are looking at the publicly available data on the Motus Dashboard for tags ((ie from tags or receivers you may or may not ‘own’.
Below is my basic understanding (please other correct me if I have anything incorrect):
These dashboard data are typically shown as daily summary-level detections—i.e., there may be one or multiple detections on the same day at a receiver.
If it is a tag or receiver for which you are authorized by the owner as an admin, you can access more detailed information, including exact times and locations. This is typically done by downloading your tag data using the Motus R package.
Note that it is entirely possible for a tag to be detected at more than one receiver during a single day, or even simultaneously at multiple receivers if they are close enough to each other.
For CTT 434 MHz tags, it only takes a single received burst to count as a detection. For Lotek 166 MHz tags, it typically requires at least three (or possibly two?) sequential tag “bursts” on a single antenna to pass post-processing and appear in the daily summary detections table.
I also recall that there may be stricter filtering applied to detection data for receivers with a known history of excessive noise or false detections.
Here is where processing is described in the Motus documentation: https://docs.motus.org/en/about-motus/how-data-are-processed
These two links contain additional detailed discussion on how data are processed:
https://github.com/MotusWTS/motusServer/blob/master/inst/doc/motus_data_overview.md