Hi all,
This isn’t a specific troubleshooting question persay, but I did want to send some feelers out and see if anyone else may have advice, know additional resources or workflows that work well for their organization - especially with Field Maps poised to be one of the main field data collection services.
I am the GIS Services Specialist at a natural resources/environmental nonprofit and we mostly do invasive plant species survey and treatment. We work over a large area (~3 counties) and are often working in rural or mountainous areas without any cell service. The data we collect is detailed, down to monitoring over a dozen plant species and recording phenology and substrate location information, in addition to photo attachments which leads to ~4000-7000 new records per year.
Data collection in offline areas is often a hassle. We currently have an Azure VM that hosts an ArcGIS Enterprise Portal, Server, and DataStore, with our field crew syncing their results after returning to good service or wifi. We have used a variety of Esri products for our offline data collection to mixed results:
- Survey123 works well for our detailed form collection, and for point data collection in offline areas, however when collecting polygons in offline areas it has to have a linked map with an offline area component, except the linked map area doesn’t show other feature service layers so it can lead to frustration when returning to a site and being unable to see previously collected data for context.
- Collector/Collector Classic: We used Collector Classic for a long time because it was the most reliable, and it could make use of hosted tracking layers. We have dabbled in using the new Collector but when it came to downloading offline areas with our hosted feature layers it was extremely unreliable. Hosted tracking layers going forward appear to require a GeoEvent Server and Temporal Big Data store which I haven’t gone through and configured yet. Plus, there is a deprecation notice for Collector.
- Field Maps: Still getting used to it, it is similar to Collector which has led to similar problems with downloading offline areas. Offline map areas created in the Web Map through Portal reliably do not download and creating offline map areas from the mobile device works better on occasion but still fails often, even over wifi. What’s frustrating is that the Portal-created offline map areas are usually small subsets of aerial imagery and our hosted data, often no more than 15-20 MB at most, but just yesterday one of our team successfully downloaded a huge mobile-created map area that was 2GB!
I’m working through how I can improve this for everybody on our team and have gotten myself pretty stuck. I’ve gone through the services and web maps dedicated to this offline data collection to confirm that they contain Hosted Feature Services with sync enabled, offline imagery, and am still encountering problems. I’m currently working on coming up with a strategy for sideloading some aerial mosaics – but my tile packages have come out too large for many of our crew’s mobile devices.
I’m wondering if anyone has had any success in data collection using ArcGIS Field Apps in primarily remote/offline areas and would be willing to impart their knowledge/workflow that gave them the best, most reliable results? Is it more advantageous to sideload one giant tile package or make smaller subsets focusing on specific areas? Is it better to include reference data such as roads and rivers in the tile package and keep only a small number of hosted feature service “data” layers for collection - thus reducing how many features are active and query-able? We often need high quality aerial imagery of watersheds and river systems so the imagery gets to be fairly detailed.
Just curious how others’ experiences have been using Esri field apps in offline areas, and what has worked best for them/what hasn’t.
Thanks!
