Managing Data in a Project

When a citizen or community science project is hosted on FieldScope, at least one person needs to be set as a “manager” for that project. Many projects choose to have more than one person set as a manager to distribute responsibility. The article below covers the tools and functionality available to managers in a FieldScope project that are used to manage communities of participants and the observational data they contribute.

Some projects hosted on FieldScope are set up to include groups, where participants select a group when they sign up. Each group can be assigned one or more managers to be set as leaders or coordinators for that group. The information below about managing data and communities of participants also applies to group leaders and coordinators, if enabled in a project. FrogWatch USA is a FieldScope project that currently has many groups set up (groups are called “chapters” in the FrogWatch USA project).

Accessing Your Project’s Data

All participants in a project are able to access the data contributions from other participants by clicking the Data section at the top of a project page. Within the Data section there are some pre-filtered tabs that show you either the 25 most recent contributions or the entire project data set. If you are signed in to FieldScope, you will also see a My Data tab that shows you your personal contributions.

If a project has groups enabled, group members will also see a My Group tab. Within this tab, there is a list of all data contributed by members of your group.

In any of these data views, you have the option to switch between Map and Table mode. In table mode (as shown below), there is also an option to Download data (in the upper left corner of the data table). You can also click the table column headings to see data in alphabetical or numeric ascending or descending order.

You can click on any row in the table to pull up a data summary card of the data for that observation, including any associated media (only applicable for projects that collect photos, videos, or other media). Managers in a project will see an Edit button here, as well. Click this to edit any details of an observation if there is an error you need to fix. In edit mode, you can also see the name and contact information for the member who contributed the data.

• More on editing data

Reviewing Data

Sometimes, as a manager of a project or group, you may be asked by project or group members to help them fix something with the data they input. You can do this by Editing the Data. 

Anytime a member makes a comment on an observation in your project--often because they have a question about it--the data associated with that observation are marked as needing to be reviewed. The observation will show up in the Manage section of your project. Click on the observation or station ID to open the data record and see comments or questions from members. In this view, you can edit or delete the data. Please be cautious and only delete data that truly need to be removed from the database (usually because an observation is a duplicate or there has been an accidental addition of data). Once data are deleted, they cannot be recovered.

When you are in the edit mode and viewing the comments added by a data manager or participant flagging data, you can add additional comments. Please note: These comments are for internal purposes only and can be viewed only by you or fellow data managers on your project. If you want to communicate with the person who submitted the data or left the comment, see their email address and contact them outside of FieldScope.

Seeing a List of Project Members

When you are set as a manager of a project (or a coordinator for your group), you will also see a Manage section at the top of the project page in FieldScope. Within the Manage tab there is a tab titled Users. This is a list of participants registered to your project (or your group). See an image below - with personal information greyed out for privacy - that gives an example of the Manage section of the FieldScope with a group’s member list pulled up.