Ahmed Zeeshan, Zeeshan Saman, Fleischmann Pauline, Rössler Wolfgang, Dandekar Thomas
Department of Quantitative Health Sciences, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Greater Boston, MA, 01605, USA ; Department of Neurobiology and Genetics, Biocenter, University of Wuerzburg, Wuerzburg, 97074, Germany ; Department of Bioinformatics, Biocenter, University of Wuerzburg, Wuerzburg, 97074, Germany.
Department of Bioinformatics, Biocenter, University of Wuerzburg, Wuerzburg, 97074, Germany.
F1000Res. 2014 Dec 19;3:311. doi: 10.12688/f1000research.5931.3. eCollection 2014.
Field studies on arthropod ecology and behaviour require simple and robust monitoring tools, preferably with direct access to an integrated database. We have developed and here present a database tool allowing smart-phone based monitoring of arthropods. This smart phone application provides an easy solution to collect, manage and process the data in the field which has been a very difficult task for field biologists using traditional methods. To monitor our example species, the desert ant Cataglyphis fortis, we considered behavior, nest search runs, feeding habits and path segmentations including detailed information on solar position and azimuth calculation, ant orientation and time of day. For this we established a user friendly database system integrating the Ant-App-DB with a smart phone and tablet application, combining experimental data manipulation with data management and providing solar position and timing estimations without any GPS or GIS system. Moreover, the new desktop application Dataplus allows efficient data extraction and conversion from smart phone application to personal computers, for further ecological data analysis and sharing. All features, software code and database as well as Dataplus application are made available completely free of charge and sufficiently generic to be easily adapted to other field monitoring studies on arthropods or other migratory organisms. The software applications Ant-App-DB and Dataplus described here are developed using the Android SDK, Java, XML, C# and SQLite Database.
关于节肢动物生态学和行为的野外研究需要简单且强大的监测工具，最好能直接访问集成数据库。我们已经开发并在此展示了一种基于智能手机监测节肢动物的数据库工具。这个智能手机应用程序为在野外收集、管理和处理数据提供了一个简单的解决方案，而对于使用传统方法的野外生物学家来说，这一直是一项非常艰巨的任务。为了监测我们的示例物种——沙漠蚂蚁箭蚁，我们考虑了行为、巢穴搜索路线、觅食习惯和路径分割，包括有关太阳位置和方位计算、蚂蚁方向以及一天中的时间的详细信息。为此，我们建立了一个用户友好的数据库系统，将蚂蚁应用数据库与智能手机和平板电脑应用程序集成在一起，将实验数据操作与数据管理相结合，并在没有任何全球定位系统（GPS）或地理信息系统（GIS）的情况下提供太阳位置和时间估计。此外，新的桌面应用程序Dataplus允许从智能手机应用程序高效地提取和转换数据到个人电脑，以便进行进一步的生态数据分析和共享。所有功能、软件代码和数据库以及Dataplus应用程序都是完全免费提供的，并且具有足够的通用性，可轻松适用于其他关于节肢动物或其他迁徙生物的野外监测研究。这里描述的软件应用程序蚂蚁应用数据库和Dataplus是使用安卓软件开发工具包（Android SDK）、Java、XML、C#和SQLite数据库开发的。
