EcoPod: A Mobile Tool for Community Based Biodiversity Collection Building

Abstract

Biological studies rely heavily on large collections of species observations. All of these collections cannot be compiled by biology professionals alone. Skilled amateurs can assist by contributing observations they make in the field. The challenge with such contributions is their potentially questionable quality. We present our PDA-based application EcoPod, which replaces traditional paper field guides with a mobile computing platform. EcoPod aims both to increase the efficiency of the identification process and its reliability. The application solicits as little information from the user as possible. At the same time it places no restrictions on the sequencing of the identification process. This approach is to make our solution attractive to both skilled amateurs and professionals. The tool creates a record of the identification process, thereby providing an audit trail for quality assurance. EcoPod's user interface driver computes information gain over identification metadata to maximize screen utilization. The tool ingests SDD, an international standard for XML dataset that describes organisms.