As part of student centered education, you can look and learn while contributing as a citizen scientist as we load our ark full of plant and animal images.
Interested parties are encouraged to participate as volunteer citizen scientists at the Wonder Gardens. A training experience is required to participate as an surveyor and collector.
Observation, Data collection and Epicollet5:
All observations are made in the field in an as-is, unaltered state. Observations are made with minimal invasion of the spaces or disruption of the animals. The garden staff and volunteers are very helpful and facilitate cooperation. Some additional lighting is used on occasion to facilitate photography for educational purposes. Some samples of the plants and animals are collected, examined and returned to their original locations. These include but are not limited to dead insects, shed bird feathers and snake skins, soil and water samples. These staged photographs allow for macro, micro and other examinations.
This Epicollect5 freeware is downloaded from their website at 5Epicollect.net/Everglades Ark. It is customizable, well explained and intuitive to use. The Everglades Wonder Gardens data portion of the website is open to the public and designed for all to view. The data can be downloaded in a comma delimited file to MS Excel for research. In order to add information to the site, participants need to be approved and their instruments validated. Only the administer may edit the entries. The instructions are embedded in the entry form.
The data from the site is arranged into two sections. These are:
- “Survey-Collection” is the data entry of the observation
- “Record” is the data entry of the method and off-site location of the high resolution records. These include the non cellphone records from written notes, camera and audio equipment and their associated sub file data such as lens type and lens settings.
The Survey and Collection section and the Record portion are entered through an app downloaded into your cell phone device in the field. After all of the field entries are made are uploaded to the epicollect5 site via an internet connection.
The File Key is the observation number. This number from the data entry point is used to reference all other data such as those of the off-site files. The off-site files are located on dedicated hard drives and backed up to a secure cloud account.
Contact John at john@evergladesark.com
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Everglades Ark 