As part of your visit to Sedgwick Reserve, please complete a quick Wildnote© survey whenever you alter a study site—such as installing or removing equipment, flagging locations, fencing, digging, seeding, or any other research-related changes or material removals. Completing the Wildnote survey provides essential information for reserve staff but also provides you with important metadata about your research activity. Reserve staff can provide those metadata to you in PDF, KML, GDB and/or XLSX formats. Everyone benefits!
Why are researchers required to complete a Wildnote survey at their field site?
Research at Sedgwick Reserve – like other research field stations – often entails some alteration to the study site(s). For example, researchers may deploy monitoring equipment such as cameras, herptile cover boards, weather stations, or soil moisture sensors. They may install fencing for exclosures or enclosures, or add flagging, tags, posts or other above- and below-ground markers. Other site alterations can include soil excavation, nutrient addition, vegetation harvest, seeding, transplants, or soil nutrient addition. The list of possibilities is practically endless
Reserve managers and other researchers need to know about these site alterations and location markers: what is being done and why? Exactly where and when did the alteration occur? Conversely, when was the research infrastructure removed from the site or site remediation such as re-filling of soil pits performed?
Information contained in UC-NRS RAMS applications is generally not sufficiently detailed or locationally precise enough to meet the needs of managers or researchers. Typically applicants do not know exactly when and where their research installations will take place until they are actually onsite. Sedgwick Reserve is asking all researchers to record this information by completing a quick survey when they perform these activities at their field site(s) using the Wildnote© mobile app.
Completing a Wildnote survey
The process is simple. On days when you are performing new site alterations, you will:
- Pick up the Sedgwick Reserve iPad from the Tipton Meeting House and take it with you to your study site(s). Reserve staff can provide you with a quick introduction to using the Wildnote app.
- At your field site, once you have completed your site alterations, record your activity using the researcher metadata survey. This survey takes 1-2 minutes to complete and also captures GPS location data and a photo. You can record multiple activities under the same survey.
- When you return the iPad to Sedgwick headquarters your survey information is automatically sent to a cloud-based server where it will be accessed by reserve staff and assimilated into a database of research activities on the reserve.
- At your request, Reserve staff will email your metadata to you in one or more formats of your choice: kmz (geospatial Google Earth), gdb (geospatial ArcGIS), tabular (Excel), or pdf. You can send your request to La Kretz Center Manager Kristen Zumdahl (kazumdahl@ucsb.edu).
Wildnote Instructional Video
Frequently Asked Questions
Q1. Do I need to download software or register anywhere to collect the Wildnote Survey data?
No, you will use the reserve’s iPad with the software installed using the reserve’s user account.
Q2. Do I have to complete a Wildnote survey every time I come to do research at the reserve?
No, you only complete a new Wildnote survey if you are making new alterations to the reserve to such as marking new plots with stakes or flags, adding new above- or below-ground equipment, adding nutrients to new study plots, digging new soil pits, and so on.
Q3. Where can I learn more about the Wildnote App?
Wildnote Inc. provides lots of excellent resources from the Wildnote homepage. The software is powerful but easy to use for designing survey forms, collecting data in the field, and editing and exporting those data after fieldwork. The company has generously provided a Wildnote user license to Sedgwick Reserve. In return, we hope to provide them useful feedback on the survey app as our field researchers and staff use Wildnote around the reserve. To that end, we hope that you will provide any feedback regarding your Wildnote experience to Sedgwick staff (email kazumdahl@ucsb.edu)