Grant: 24-025R
Project Title: Bringing the UCF Marine Turtle Research Group Database into the 21st Century
Project Manager: Kate L. Mansfield, Ph.D.
Organization: University of Central Florida (Research and Educational Institute)
Grant Amount: $17,354.00
Completion Date:
Summary: This project will work with database specialists (Skeleton Key, a University of Central Florida contracted vendor) to stabilize, update, streamline, and fix our existing FileMaker Pro sea turtle database. The UCF Marine Turtle Research Group (UCF MTRG) has collected an enormous amount of data over 40+ years along some of the most important stretches of nesting beach and developmental in-water habitats in the United States and world. The database structure and design are unnecessarily complicated and clunky. Data entry is not streamlined, and many newer data points are relegated to comments sections. The database is not relational, and we cannot easily follow the fates of individual turtles through time. In our phased approach, first steps are to: (1) develop beach survey database entry fields within our existing database to house all beach survey data with our tagged turtle and nest fate datasets, and create functions to quickly and efficiently query survey data and generate report data while minimizing human error; and (2) troubleshoot and streamline our existing tagged turtle and nest fate datasets in the database by adding new collection fields to better quantify samples and other data collected from turtle encounters and nest inventories (vs. entering these data in a comments section where data may be missed). 
Results: