Open the link to the page for entering monitoring data. No password is needed to enter data.
The first page you will see is a page to select your monitoring site. If you have entered a set of default values for the data entry form for your site, select your site and click on "Display form" to retrieve a data form containing those values. If you want a blank form, click on "Display form" with no site selected. If you select your site but have not entered default values, you will also open a blank data entry form. See below for how to set your defaults.
Click on each field and enter the data requested. On the new form, any fields with a strict format are presented as pull down menus.
Use the pull down menu to select the species for each species for which you have a count. The species are arranged by groups such as swallowtails. Within each group, the species are listed in alphabetical order by common name.
If another person comes with you as a note taker, enter their name in the note taker section.
Enter the temperature at the beginning of your route.
Enter the count for each species and transect in the row for that species and column for the transect. The form will allow you to leave the counts for a species entry blank when you have specified a species name but have no count to enter for that species.
Enter species which are unidentified or not completely identified in the comments section. For example: Question Mark/Comma 3 in transect C.
If you see a butterfly species which is not in the pull down list, also enter it in the comments section with the species name, transect, and count.
Once you have entered all the data, click on "Send data" at the bottom of the form. You will see a new page with a message at the top of page which either states that the data was accepted, or that it was not accepted and listing the errors. Below those messages will be a summary of the data you entered.
If the form reports that the data has errors, use the "redisplay form" button at the bottom of the page to bring the form back with your data on it so that you can correct those fields and resubmit the data. You can also use the back button on the browser, but sometimes after a few minutes the browser times out and the data will not appear on the form again if you go back to it with the back button.
If the data is accepted and you have another set of data to enter, you can use the back button on the browser to go back to the previous form. If a set of default values was used when the form was originally brought up, you can reset the form to its default values using the "Restore defaults" button at the bottom of the form, or by using the refresh button on your browser. Then, fill in the form with the next set of data.
You can view your data immediately after you enter it in the
log file.
If you discover after you have entered your data that you made a minor error, contact Doug with a description of the error using the
send correction
form. If there are a number of errors in your data, re-enter the data and then contact Doug.
Your data will not appear in the monitoring database until Doug checks it and enters it, probably at the end of the season.
If you encounter a problem entering data, please contact
Jim Peterson
directly rather than describing the problem in the data record. Jim does see the data records that are entered, but the records do not contain your email address for Jim to contact you about the problem. Send Jim an email directly describing the problem, any error messages you received, and what you did.
