Capturing Data in the Field: An Application Framework for Easily Creating Custom Data and Metadata Entry Forms on Handheld and Desktop Computers

生态学家调查了一些关键的和多样化的环境问题，从全球气候变化到生物多样性的丧失。支持这一系列研究所需的数据是高度复杂和多变的，而且这些数据的收集往往需要大量的劳动。这些特点对生态数据的收集和管理提出了明显的挑战，而现有的软件工具无法满足这些挑战。保存和重新利用生态数据的前景由于它们往往描述不佳和存档不充分而进一步受到损害。因此，过去收集的可能相关的数据往往难以找到或难以解释，因为它们的收集方式含糊不清。瓶颈是缺乏用于数据文档的标准方法或格式，也缺乏辅助这些功能的易于使用的框架。这些数据管理和访问问题将通过减少在现场捕获环境数据过程中的低效率和错误来解决。这将通过为手持现场设备和台式计算机设计和构建一套灵活、易于使用的软件工具来实现，这将简化现场数据收集、数据输入和数据文档。这些软件工具将帮助创建结构良好、明确且视觉上令人愉悦的数据输入表单，从而消除了为每个新项目定制数据库开发的需要，也消除了将数据随意且容易出错地输入到“自由格式”电子表格中的需要。最后，研究人员和学生将接受使用这些新工具的培训。在更大的空间尺度和更长的时间范围内，对合成生态学研究的需求日益增长，这将为对生命系统提供更有力的理解。这种综合需要综合从许多来源收集的环境数据。为了实现这一目标，必须更多地关注如何收集和保存原始数据。通过这样做，这项研究应该对科学界产生重大影响——促进生态和环境数据的捕获、记录和获取。该软件不仅旨在简化收集数据的过程，而且还通过强制执行逻辑一致的数据结构来促进良好的数据实践。

Ecologists investigate a number of critical and diverse environmental issues, ranging from global climate change to the loss of biodiversity. The data needed to support this range of research are highly complex and variable, and the data are often labor-intensive to collect. These characteristics present distinct challenges for the collection and management of ecological data that are not being met by the range of available software tools. Prospects for the preservation and re-use of ecological data are further compromised by their tendency to be poorly described and inadequately archived. As a result, potentially relevant data that have been collected in the past are often difficult to find or difficult to interpret because of ambiguities in how they were collected. The bottleneck is a lack of standard methods or formats for data documentation or easy-to-use frameworks that assist in these functions.These data management and access problems will be solved by reducing inefficiencies and errors during the process of capturing environmental data in the field. This will be achieved through the design and building of a set of flexible, easy-to-use software tools for handheld field devices, as well as desktop computers-that will streamline field data collection, data entry and data documentation. These software tools will assist in the creation of data entry forms that are well-structured, unambiguous, and visually pleasing-thus eliminating the need for customized database development for each new project, or the often haphazard and error-prone entry of data into "free-form" spreadsheets. Finally, researchers and students will be trained in the use of these new tools.There is a growing need for synthetic ecological studies that will provide for a more powerful understanding of living systems, over larger spatial scales and longer time periods. Such syntheses require integrating environmental data collected from a number of sources. To achieve this goal, it is imperative to pay more attention to how the raw data are collected and preserved. The research should have major impacts on the scientific community by doing this-facilitating the capture, documentation and accessibility of ecological and environmental data. This software is not only intended to simplify the process of collecting data, but also to promote sound data practice by enforcing logically consistent data structures.