Tracking butterflies with a pencil and paper can be really difficult. This is the main method currently to track and gather data of butterflies. With 100+ butterfly species needing to be tracked, tracking by hand is not feasible. Our app addresses this problem by giving the user a way to create surveys. These surveys allow the user to gather butterfly counts and much more. This app cuts the amount of time the user needs to take to find a certain species of butterfly, allows users to track more butterflies, and gives more data than before.
The app has a few different pages, the main two being the survey creation page, and the survey page.
This page gets the default information that a survey requires. There are a few different types of survey, pollard, meandering, and incidental. Pollard is the most common for the user. This is a set path with different sections, meandering purposely walking around, but not a set path, and incidental is for a quick sighting on the go. Then we get to some user estimated weather data and location. This data is cross checked in the survey from weather stations as well. Then we get to the survey.
This page has the recording of the butterflies that we see on the survey. The user can see the sections at the top for a pollard survey. This is removed when doing a different version of survey. Then there is the users favorite butterflies, which they can choose on the favorites page. Below this we have the search bar. We can search through the whole butterfly database if needed. The user can tap the button to add these to the seen butterflies. Once finished, the user submits the survey.
The user has a few more pages that are accessible. The settings page, admin page, exporting page, favorites page, and recent surveys page. The settings page allows a user to set defaults to fill in data on the pre-survey items. The admin page only allows admins in, and this is where the admins can add and delete the butterflies. They also can make other users admins. Inside this admin page, we can also see some statistics of the surveys submitted. Exporting page has the ability to export all surveys from a given time period. The favorites page allows users to favorite a butterfly. This is then seen at the top of the survey recording page.
This project was alongside Reiman Gardens here at Iowa State University. This app will be used to help them track butterfly populations and survey them for the national pollard database.