Hey @Florian_May, I thought it appropriate to create a new thread for this discussion.
(for other interested readers, this thread was created as a reply to a comment on the "Introduce yourself here!" topic. You can find it here).
Sadly I abandoned the project without making much progress. But I can share my plans, and I'm open to helping out/colaborating with you if you want!
We as volunteers had to fill out a format with every turtle and nest we saw. They are paper formats. The information included tag number, date seen, whether it laid eggs, how many eggs, if it had scars from previous tags, mutilations, the length and width of the turtle, species, nest number, and general location.
We also had another format for the nests when the baby turtles were born. The information included the general location of the nest, the nest number if the stake was still there, the species, number of born turtles, number of dead turtles, number of eggs found in the nest, born and unborn, whether the nest was destroyed, poached, or if it was in a good state.
The biologists then had to verify the data and transfer it to a big physical spreadsheet, where it would be taken to the central offices and uploaded to a database.
I wanted to simplify that process with ODK and make it so it automatically uploaded to the database, or have a .csv file with the pertinent data for easy transfer. As well as potentially add the functionality of gps localization for each nest, photos, and maybe an alert at the start of the night with the location of every nest that we expected to be born around that time (using normal incubation times for that species) so we knew where to focus our efforts, as we were working on a very touristic area with beachside hotels, bars and restaurants, so the turtles were under heavy risk of injury, getting disoriented by lights, and getting manipulated by uninformed tourists or drunk people.
Sadly there was an incident with an unruly tourist and the organization had to cancel the volunteer program for that year (as well as lack of funds due to covid), so I had to move on with other responsibilities.
I'm still open on working on the project though, and perhaps we can work together to make something good we can both use, and hopefully other conservationists around the world can use too!
Are you already using ODK? How are you collecting data? I'd like to know more about your project too!
Best regards,
Diego.