A datasheet format for survey with repeat entries?

[AvivaGottesman]

Hello,

I'm trying to mimic an ecological vegetation datasheet with my survey. We record individuals shrubs and trees and each stem is recorded with: "species", "diameter" and "height". Is there a way to duplicate a group while you are filing out the survey in the field? Would this be much slower than filling out an excel spreadsheet? It's sometimes 50 stems in a plot that need to be recorded. Any advice would be appreciated! I hope the question makes sense....Example datasheet attached. Thank you!

Any better applications for this kind of work? We have 15 years of data already recorded for these permanent long-term ecosystem monitoring plots. 

Thanks,

AG

[DougBrowning]

No you cannot grow a repeat down like a table. 

Upvote all of these ideas please

Appearance option to view Repeats stacked in Survey123 app 

Table view for repeats 

Fix painful repeat navigation issues - have navigation mirror that of the pages group appearance 

I agree a excel type interface is faster.  I really think 123 needs to make data entry faster in general.  Upvote these ideas here.  Specific ideas to speed up 123 data entry   Data entry density needs to be looked at in general.  Apps like FileMaker are way better at this.  I really wish more field testing for speed was done by 123 team - needs to be faster than paper to get people to use it.  

Right now the only way to do it is to have Field 1-20 for each of those then use the Grid style.  It works but the schema is a mess.  I am having to flip them to rows when moving to SQL at the end of the year - which is a pain.  But it is just SO much faster for the crew I had to do it.

Hope that helps.

[AvivaGottesman]

Unfortunately, I don't believe Survey123 will be the right application for us...If you have other alternative suggestions such as the FileMaker software, please feel free to share! Thank you so much.

[DougBrowning]

We do 50 points per transect line collecting species, height, etc at each one and it works fine.  I added some things like defaults to speed up collection.

While the UI on the Esri products is a bit clunky and slow the total amount of time a project takes is for sure less than when we used FileMaker and Access.  Mainly the project setup, being spatial, connecting to the cloud, and security (huge for us) are all so much easier.  No more sending files back an forth, tracking progress in excel, bad data etc - but the biggie was not having to built a custom app from the ground up.  These projects are way more than just the forms.

As far as other products the list is long - just try a search there are a ton. I have tested 10-15 over the years.  The big hole in most of them was auto sync to a cloud which allows us to work at the scale of 1,000s of users.  Plus we are an Esri shop on the backend so it all just fits together.

That said, looking at your sheet it looks like forestry to me.  I did tree surveys in my old job where we used a 3rd party Esri stack app called MobileMap by Mason, Bruce, and Girard out of Portland (ask for Kerry).  They custom built it for forestry and it is super fast for the crews.  Looks a lot like what you have here.  They did a ton of speed optimization with crews.  I have to say that is one thing I really wish 123 would do - work with real field crews to speed up data entry.  

Hope that helps.

[Korie]

@DougBrowning 

You mention using S123 for a 50m transect, collecting point intercept data (e.g., ground cover, % cover and height). I am trying to create a field form for vegetation transects but I am having difficulties with the repeat questions data- my species data is in a separate table than my point data. Is there a way to link the two repeat questions for more efficient data analysis? As it is, I can assign the transect ID to mont_point and mont_species by the timestamp but can't necessarily attribute mont_species to a particular mont_point. 

Thank you in advance,

[DougBrowning]

Not sure I understand but maybe.

If you want the 2 repeat tables to know what transect you are on just add fields and push it in there.

I do this all the time.  I tend to use it to push in my main key that I use later in a relationship.

Hope that is what you wanted.  Is this a pin drop method?  If so we do that using Top, Lower1, 2, etc instead of a repeat.