Has any DOTs implemented Collector/Survey 123 for their wetland delineations and wetland determination forms? Nebraska DOT has a pilot project under way to convert the wetland determination form into Survey 123 application. We have almost completed it but having a few issues regarding dominance test for vegetation along with a few issues regarding the report template. We are willing to share our insights so far and interested to see what other DOTs are doing.
I am not with the DOT but I am looking to do something like this for wetlands assessments in Florida. What types of issues were you running into with the reporting template?
Angela,
We found it was due to how we had things setup in the repeat. I had the repeat in and out of a table inside of the word document and it needed to have the repeat all within the table itself.
${#SoilProf}${Depth1}
${Color1}
${PercSoil}
${ColorRedox1}
${PercSoilRedox1}
${SoilType}
${SoilLocation}
${SoilTextureRedox}${/SoilProf}
I had the repeat name and closing of the repeat outside of this table and sometimes it would break my export of the data in the report.
For our dominance test we found out as well that survey 123 does not have the function to call previous entries from the repeat so we cant do the dominance calculation as needed. For now we will have the end user manually determine if they species is dominant or not.
Thanks,
Claire
Hi Claire,
We have an upcoming enhancement (planned for 3.4) that may be able to help with the dominance testing - could I revisit this with you to work on the methodology?
James - Yes absolutely!
James with this latest release in June does this have the ability to calculations within repeat field?
https://ecobotapp.com/
Looks like this company has done it.
I see this thread has been quiet for a little while now, but am curious if any Survery123 users out there have successfully implemented this wetland determination survey form and the associated feature report for it.
@ThomasHamill
I'll take a look, but that fact that you did this is awesome. While my firm only does wetlands determination in certain offices (and this does not apply to those offices) I've been wondering why government orgs that clearly use ESRI tools/ GIS haven't created these for public use and distribution because it would benefit us all.
Hows this form been working out? I just saw thus post but would be willing to try it ourlt and test it for you. I do wetland work in nc/ne but have used a few other electric forms and would be willing to give it a test. Thanks for sharing.
@CurtKleist, I haven't received any feedback on it yet, so feel free to give it a whirl, especially if you're familiar with Survey123! It'll be important for me receive feedback in order to better understand changes and revisions that will need to be made to the form, and prior to making any attempts to develop a Feature Report that matches the official USACE WDF PDF (which is ultimately my goal).
Thanks I'll check it out. Id like to get something setup for the NC/NE. Another company I know uses fulcrum for this but I'd like to customize something cheaper. I will look at it right now. I mainly use Field Maps and do it all myself but Ill test survey 123.
CK
Update: An XLSForm design for the USACE Wetland Determination Data Form (Atlantic and Gulf Coastal Plain Region) has been accepted by the Esri Survey123 team and published as a community template in Survey123 Connect. Search for "USACE" in the New Survey menu of Survey123 Connect with the "Community" button selected to locate the template.
Update: The USACE Wetland Determination Data Form (AGCP) is now available in the Community section of Survey123 Connect. Here's the direct link to the survey item.
FWIW, here's the original thread associated with the effort.
Thanks this looks great i will look it over in more detail this weekend! I wish you had one for the NC/NE region!
@CurtKleist, I'm going to try to make a "universal" one that'd work for any region (assuming it's even possible). Unless I'm mistaken, a big piece of making this possible is using the National Wetland Plant List instead of the regional ones. If that's the case, I need to prepare this species/plant list for use as an External Choice List first (which is what I did for the AGCP region) and this will involve some substantial data clean-up, removing special characters, etc.
Yes that would likely be the key. Also, we only have 3 strata (plus vines) in the NC/NE. Also, yes the National plant list would need to be used. Another item - it would be nice to enter saturation depth, HWT, Surface Water depths. I used one of these pretty similar through a different app I could screen shot u a few photos as well. I will look it over in more detail. This is great and amazing though, its something we really need!
@ThomasHamill, were you ever able to complete a universal form. Most of my work is within the Eastern Piedmont Region. Thanks for all the hard work!
@icf_Eric_Link Will you be attending the Esri UC? I've brought this up to a handful of colleagues and we're interested in speaking with users about this more.
Hi Sunny! Looking forward to demoning what we have so far to you after the user conference. I wish we could be there this year! Enjoy yourself! -Nancy Douglas
hello all! Checking back in on this wetland form megathread after several recent revisions. I've been revising and maintaining a working version of the USACE form over the years, which specifically meet my needs at NPS, but I thought I'd share my latest versions and associated add-ons for the greater good. Attached below are a handful of files that make up the latest revision to my wetland form. A few notes about this version with particular differences from my previously posted versions:
I hope this helps folks in the field!
Thanks for sharing this, Byron! I haven’t done any testing in the field yet but it’s worked great so far in desktop testing. A while back in this thread (2019 I think) you had posted about wanting to re-implement a version of the form design using repeats with the possibility of using javascript - did you ever give that a go? Just curious what the main road blocks/issues were if you did try using repeats but ultimately decided against it. The version you’ve shared is great and on top of that pretty amazing that the feature report comes out so cleanly. Just interested in your experience of using repeats as we seem to face this issue a lot of preferring to use repeats from a data structure standpoint but find that has it’s own tradeoffs.
Sure thing, Kam. Unpacking your questions a bit:
The drive to deploy repeats and js was an attempt to avoid performance problems associated with large choice lists for plant species. In the earliest versions of this form, I was limited to only a few hundred of the most common species due to memory demands on older devices, stemming from all the duplicate select_one plant lookup questions. My work-around was to do pre-field prep to have location-specific version of this survey with only the most abundantly observed species. everything else would be flagged as "other" and then I would supplement species lists as-needed during post-fieldwork data cleanup. It was ugly but functional.
Unfortunately, I was never able to make the repeats work. In particular the 50/20 dominance test and the report template export didn't play well with repeats. I fiddled with indexed repeats when those came out but in the end it wasn't worth the effort to overhaul.
Once we had the ability to use select_one_from_file questions, this problem went away, as the form was able to handle large 3-5k species lists despite the duplicate questions. The form still takes several seconds to load, but it's a reasonable delay, so I haven't been motivated to revisit the repeats issue. At this point I have one instance of the form for each of the USACE regional supplements, which meets out needs perfectly.
Thanks, Byron. Makes sense. Will be fiddling with repeats and likely using javascript quite a bit when necessary but agree it brings complexity that's better to avoid if you can.
Byron, any chance you would be willing to share the report templates for the other USACE regional supplements? We are interested in utilizing this. Your EMP report seems to suit our needs well!
I only have a couple regional report templates that actually work. I only produce and revise as needed, so I haven't had much need for forms beyond the Southeast. Here's what I have currently. Be aware that these span a few different revision cycles of the main survey form, so some of the templates may not work perfectly. I suggest testing on old data to cross-walk the fields against known data before deploying these.
Hey again friends ־
It's been another couple years, and I'm delighted to see that this thread continues to live as a hub for using Survey123 in wetland delineation work. In the last year or so, I've finally spent the time to re-tool this survey form as a UNIVERSAL delineation tool applicable to delineations in all USACE regulatory districts and any MLRA/LRR ecoregion. This latest version asks the user for site/location data which in turn applies several choice filters to limit choices to appropriate regional responses. This approach proves most effective when you revise and update an external lookup table "LOOKUP_sites.csv" prior to your fieldwork, so all these location prompts auto-fill from a single pulldown selection. Attached are the survey form and a series of LOOKUP tables (csv files) which drive the choice lists. NOTE: the plants list is based on a version of NWPL downloaded in April 2025, and has not been maintained since then. It was a bit of a PITA to format the NWPL list into this CSV, so be warned that it's unlikely to get updates with any frequency.
Good luck out there folks!
Wonderful! Thank you for sharing. I will be sure to test before deploying
Hey folks! The wetlands thread LIVES! One of my favorite topics and it reminds me that last year we actually did a webinar series and one of the featured speakers was Stantec with their wetland delineation solution. They configured this with Field Maps and S123. Starts around minute mark 31: https://mediaspace.esri.com/media/t/1_5aw1qwln/238782193Esri is eager for your feedback on this. How can we support the community?? Warm regards,Sunny FlemingDirector - Conservation Solutions
@LittleMissEsri, I think this effort and the Esri Community would benefit greatly from Esri Survey123 team support or an Esri solutions engineer to make this into an official Survey123 Template (or official app like what's been done with Field Maps, QuickCapture, etc.).
If you scan back and read through this thread from the beginning, you'll see how the Esri user community has contributed substantial efforts towards prototyping this XLSForm (most of the "heavy lifting") throughout the past six years, and since there is consistent demand and renewed interest for this product at the beginning of the vernal pool/wetland season every year, the next logical step seems to be to formalize the XLSForm prototype as a template in Survey123 and make it into an official Esri solution like what Wildnote (wildnoteapp.com) and Ecobot (ecobot.com) have done. FWIW, these Esri competitors are still capturing a bunch of the potential customers/end-users/market share for a product like this since they've been ahead of Esri on a field mobile data collection USACE Wetland Determination Form solution for at least a few years now...
This effort to produce and refine a reliable USACE Wetland Determination Form (free of bugs/glitches) has benefitted from numerous Esri Community contributors (most recently from @ByronTsang, but also from @ClaireInbody1, @CurtKleist, and myself back in 2021, 2022, and 2023). At one point I even reached out to the Survey123 for help to QA/QC and publish (an earlier incarnation of) the form as an official template in the Survey123 app (correspondence attached). I'm a little surprised this hasn't received more interest from the Esri solutions teams given the continued interest for six years and longstanding gap in the Esri solutions offerings.
I think the next most logical step is to do this process again i.e., have the Survey123 Team take @ByronTsang's latest form—the one with the multi-region functionality—QA/QC and refine it, then publish it as an official S123 template (or standalone app like Field Maps or QuickCapture). There was also a related/parallel effort to generate a working Survey123 Feature Report template to go along with the XLSForm. More of that is detailed in separate thread here: USACE Wetland Determination Form (and Feature Report).
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