Zoo Diet NaviGator: new features, new partnerships, and new ways to support your nutrition program and sustainability

Citation

Bissell H. 2025. Zoo Diet Navigator: new features, new partnerships, and new ways to support your nutrition program and sustainability. In Treiber K, Brooks M, D’amato-Anderson J, Nylander J, Eds. Proceedings of the Sixteenth Conference on Zoo and Wildlife Nutrition, AZA Nutrition Advisory Group, Oklahoma City, OK.

Abstract

Zoo Diet NaviGator, first released in 2017, has grown to over 400 known active users and nearly 5,000 downloads in 84 countries, and it has been translated into 4 languages. Updated versions are released twice a year, and additional contributors have added exciting new features.

Some features added in the last two years include comparative feed, diet, animal, and historical reports allowing you to look across diets over time and across animals in your collection to look for trends and outliers. We’ve held our first user conference in February 2025 and the online community forum and user guide have continued to grow, along with the addition of a YouTube channel. New contributors have created a beautiful new diet analysis spreadsheet and a flexible lab data importer to take nearly any lab’s nutrient analysis report and import it.

We are excited to partner with WildBytes and NANP to replace the built-in demo dataset with a curated dataset with high quality feed nutrient data and to support them by helping build their lab data importer.

Finally, in conjunction with the Aquarium Conservation Partnership (ACP), we released Sustainability Reports that allow users to classify their diets and their collection by a sustainability score and see areas of opportunity.

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