Database management system for ecological field surveys

ECOLOG is a specimen-based, cross-platform relational database management system, aimed at the storage, retrieval and preliminary analysis of data on sites, species, and specimens gathered in ecological field surveys and biodiversity inventories. The main goal of ECOLOG is to make the data gathered in ecological field surveys readily accessible, providing lists of species collected in the study area and informations on habitat preferences, abundance or rarity of a given species, biometrics, morphology, dominance, and spatial location of each specimen collected in the field.

ECOLOG is written in FreePascal/Lazarus, a free, cross-platform object-oriented programming language for Rapid Application Development. Therefore, the program is platform-independent, and can run without modifications on any PC compatible with the x86 architecture, under GNU/Linux, MacOSX, and MS-Windows.

1. Simple menu-driven, multiple document interface, using familiar terminology and options which reflect the researcher workflow

2. Direct utilization of electronic spreadsheets in several formats (.xls, .xlsx, .ods, .csv, and .tsv), which the user can create and edit is her/his favorite program (Office Excel, LibreOffice/OpenOffice Calc, Gnumeric, etc.)

3. Interactive filter definition for the selection of the records; each data field or combination of fields can be used as criteria for record retrieval, including text-based ones

4. Simple predefined reports, including checklists, and collecting labels, with output in HTML format, allowing the automatic production of Web pages from database contents

5. Generation of database statistics, including counts of species per family/genus, with percents, counts of individuals per species, also with percents, rarefraction curves, and several diversity indices for one or more filtered sites; these statistics can then be used to automatically produce simple bar and line graphs

6. Storage of user-defined morphological and biometrical descriptors and environmental variables

7. Flexible export of data in several different formats for exchange with other software

8. Support to storage and statistical analysis of short gene sequences for biodiversity inventories using DNA barcode

9. Support to the description of the contents, context, structure, and accessibility of data sets (metadata), based on the Ecological Metadata Language (EML) standard

10. Integration with Google Earth, for generating distribution maps of specimens from spatial coordinate data stored in the database, exported to KML format

11. Multivariate analysis of ecological data (similarity indices, cluster analysis, ordination), directly from ECOLOG, by means of the R system for statistical computing and graphics

12. Localized versions in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, geared towards other countries in Latin America, Caribbean, and Africa