Collector for collecting data at the same point over time.

[EricCromwell1]

I am looking to have students use Collector on our next box trails.  Establishing the initial location of the boxes and their point specific attributes (height, direction, ground cover, etc.) is simple.  However, I want students be able to return to the same location and update the box with data such as nesting species, number of eggs, color of eggs, number of hatchlings, and fledglings.   We would want to continue this collection annually to look for trends.  Any ideas how to configure the geodatabase to accommodate?

[ElenaTakaki]

While I do not have an answer to your question, I recently attended the ESRI Educator Conference and they mentioned that there will be an online course available for Collector. I will certainly keep an eye out for it and it may be able to help us all answer some of the detailed questions about implementing Collector.

What I would like to see happen is Maryland develop a set of citizen science activities in which we can all participate. For example, create a water quality collection project and we can all join it and share our data and then do some data analysis bases on multiple points of data throughout the state.

[RussRoberts]

Hey Eric,

I would set this up with a feature class with a relationship class to a table that is one to many. The feature class will be the box location with information about the box, the table will be annual report of attributes collected at the box. The relationship will be one to many so for one box you can have multiple reports associated with it so you can determine any trends. Also I would enable editor tracking on the table and be able to automatically collect date/time and creator information automatically when a new report is collected.

Russ

[Guidovan_der_Kolk1]

In addition to Russel's reply, here's a good blog post by ESRI expaining related tables/relationship classes for Collector.