Grant: 14-041C
Project Title: Save the Turtles Save the Trees!
Project Manager: Suzi Fox
Organization: Anna Maria Island Turtle Watch (Non-Profit Organization)
Grant Amount: $3,050.00
Completion Date: 2015-09-25

Summary: Anna Maria Island Turtle Watch & Shorebird Monitoring program has been in existence for 31 years and documented 4041 sea turtle nests. We work out of a home office on a small budget with all paper work stored in our tiny little office. We must have every year’s data close at hand as we are called on each year to pull out our clunky notebooks with those data pages for local projects that occur on the our sea turtle nesting beaches. This project will allow AMITW to go paperless by producing a program to use in the field to collect data on electronic tablets.

Results: We are into our 2nd season with our electronic data collection tablets. The App has exceeded our expectations. The App we crated and the tablet we choose are very user friendly and make data collection easy for even our most novice of users. When the data is entered in the field, it is stored locally on the tablet. Daily WiFi connection pushes the info to its storage to the Cloud. We are proud to be paperless and collection of data is quick and easy. Data stored in the Cloud is then pulled down to a spread sheet we have created that then gets loaded on to the two state spread sheets. This has worked flawlessly. We have had no issue of lost or corrupt data. The storage Spread Sheet is viewed every few days and if a piece of information has not been captured to the tablet the staff member gets an ernail to make sure they correct this. We are in our 2nd season and we have had two tablets break. Because our data is stored right in the cloud data recover is never an issue. We watched for sales of our tablets and purchased two used Nexus 7 Tablets. We have them configured with our App and ready if needed. This problem was solved with better cases. We sampled many different ones. We did find a case called Gumdrop the best at $50. We purchased 8 of these and had no breakage this season.