We have been working with the Spatial Ecology & Landuse Unit SELU (part of the School of Biological & Molecular Sciences) at Oxford Brookes University.
SELU have received proof of concept funding to develop the Student-ID project. The grant will be used to assess the potential market for user friendly ID keys, and to take the idea to the point where it is capable of attracting external funding.
SELU recently obtained a partnership grant from The Royal Society for a project in collaboration with Lord Williams's School seeking to encourage biological identification and recording amongst school children.
Our part in this project has been to develop two software modules. The first, running on a desktop PC, allows the user to create a species (in this case Butterfly) identification key. The second module runs on a 'Pocket PC' PDA with integrated GPS. The user (in this pilot project the PDA users are school children) can identify butterflys by navigating a cleverly designed key, and then record the species with date, time and position information provided by the built-in GPS device. This information is than transferred to the desktop for mapping and reporting purposes.
The software has been developed in a way that supports the construction and use of any type of key with little or no change to the program logic (the key engine). The PDA favours the use of keys that are supported by pictures (of species, and defining characteristics), and there are some limitations on text due to screen size, but overall, the hardware and software combination seems to function well.
The hardware used for the pilot project was the Mio 168 (Digi Walker), which has a nice bright screen, good gps acquisition, and a relatively high specification for the price, though any Pocket PC/Mobile Windows device with integrated or attached gps would probably be suitable. A useful addition would be a built-in digital camera (to take pictures of identified or unidentified species) - and I don't suppose we will have to wait too long for that.
The software was developed on the PC using Visual Basic 6, and on the PDA using Embedded Visual Basic 3, with data held in Access databases.
Bespoke code was developed to communicate with the GPS using simple NMEA sentences. You can download an example applet that only establishes your current position and the relative positions of satellites in view by following this link
(If you are running a recent OS like Mobile Windows 2003 you may need to install the compatibility layer from Microsoft (eg msvbppc.armv4.cab)).
You can find out more about this exciting new development by visiting the following link:
Species Identification on Handheld Computers (Pocket PC)