Creating a survey

Modified on: Mon, 10 Aug, 2020 at 12:08 PM

Once you’ve created a project in BioCollect, you will be able to create one or more surveys for the project. To create a survey, you must make sure that:

You are an admin of the project you wish to create a survey within
You have selected the option to record your project data within BioCollect in the project configuration

To create a survey, go to the Admin tab and click on Survey Settings, and then the Add survey button.

You can then fill in all the details of your survey. The information you provide here will form the metadata for your survey, which is important for people who may use your data later, if you choose to share it.

All fields marked by a red asterisk are mandatory and must be completed before you can save the project. There is no draft status of the information, but you will be able to come back later and edit it.

If you have more than one survey, make sure you have the correct survey selected in the drop down next to ‘Select survey’.

Once you’ve entered the survey information you can set up the survey form and configure other survey options:

Survey method type

Survey and sampling methods help users to assess dataset suitability for their purpose. It helps in understanding sampling bias and limitations which may/may not make the data compatible with the user’s intended application for it.

If your survey is just recording ad-hoc sightings, you should select ‘Opportunistic/ad-hoc observation recording’ as the survey method type and the sampling method will be pre-filled for you.

Otherwise, you should select ‘Systematic method-based survey’ as the survey method type. If you select this, you will then need to select the method which best fits your methodology from the drop-down list in the survey/sampling method used question. You will also need to fill in at least one of the additional fields which appear (see below), or attach a document describing your sampling method. These additional fields won’t appear if you selected ‘Opportunistic/ad-hoc observation recording’ as the survey method type.

Survey details

Start and end dates

The dates form part of the survey metadata, and also control when users will be able to add records to the survey.

Allow public users to enter data

When you create a survey it is automatically restricted to being accessible only by project members. If you want to open it up to the public to enter data, you will need to check the tick-box on this field.

Comments on records allowed

You can configure surveys to allow discussion threads and commentary on individual records in the view mode. This can be useful as part of a suite of measures to improve data quality and species identification. This field is disabled by default and you will need to check the tick-box to enable it.

Data sharing license

You must choose a Creative Commons license to make your data available under. You can find more information on Creative Commons licences here.

Data quality questions

All the questions from the dataset reliability tags question form part of the survey metadata and, like the survey method questions, help potential users of your survey data to make informed decisions about its suitability for their use.

We encourage you to take the time to fill out these questions to help make your data useful to researchers, decision-makers and other potential users.