Print PageThe USA National Phenology Network (USA-NPN) seeks to collect and disseminate continentally relevant data regarding the phenology of a diverse array of species, as well as enable and inform the general public of science and the relevance biological systems hold in their own locales. Technology often serves as the bridge between these goals, and to that end the USA-NPN has developed robust information management systems, including tools for mobile data collection and dissemination.Results/Conclusions
Results/Conclusions
As technology marches forward, internet enabled ‘smart-phones’ appear more and more frequently in day-to-day life, and pose as a valuable interface for citizen science organizations to exploit. The USA-NPN recognized this opportunity, taking the first steps to integrate its citizen science program into mobile technology. The USA-NPN developed web services to support mobile applications. Web services have many benefits over traditional application-to-data interfaces, such as implementation agnosticism, simplification of data access, and explicit security on the data served to clients. In this session, we share best practices in web service and mobile application development, including how we addressed the challenges of cross-platform compatibility, security and standards compliance.
