Abstract
Smartphones and their apps (application software) are now used by millions of people worldwide and represent a powerful combination of sensors, information transfer, and computing power that deserves better exploitation by ecological and evolutionary researchers. We outline the development process for research apps, provide contrasting case studies for two new research apps, and scan the research horizon to suggest how apps can contribute to the rapid collection, interpretation, and dissemination of data in ecology and evolutionary biology. We emphasize that the usefulness of an app relies heavily on the development process, recommend that app developers are engaged with the process at the earliest possible stage, and commend efforts to create open-source software scaffolds on which customized apps can be built by nonexperts. We conclude that smartphones and their apps could replace many traditional handheld sensors, calculators, and data storage devices in ecological and evolutionary research. We identify their potential use in the high-throughput collection, analysis, and storage of complex ecological information.
Highlights
The rise of mobile technology continues apace and is beginning to provide remarkable opportunities for use in ecological and evolutionary research
We emphasize that the usefulness of an app relies heavily on the development process, recommend that app developers are engaged with the process at the earliest possible stage, and commend efforts to create open-source software scaffolds on which customized apps can be built by nonexperts
Smartphones provide the user with increased computational abilities, internet access, global positioning systems (GPS), access to geographical information systems (GIS), microphones, accelerometers, and cameras with the capability to take high-resolution photographs, and to read QR/barcodes and record video
Summary
The rise of mobile technology continues apace and is beginning to provide remarkable opportunities for use in ecological and evolutionary research (e.g., see Snaddon et al 2013). The Great Koala Count (Atlas of Living Australia) app takes a similar approach for gathering abundance and distribution data in Australia, but targets the public in a citizen science approach These two examples have straightforward goals that are made transparent to the user, have very simple user interfaces, utilize the technology on the smartphone (in this case GPS, touchscreen, internal storage, and internet connectivity), and will generate research-quality data that would otherwise have been difficult and costly to obtain. Platforms providing open-access source code for relatively generic smartphone apps, database schema, and websites are available, such as the Ushahidi platform (www.ushahidi.com), which was developed primarily for political monitoring applications (Okolloh 2009) Such platforms can be modified for custom uses by a skilled programmer (e.g. the DORIS app described in the case study below was created in this way), and as a side benefit, this approach contributes back to the open-source community. Most apps will require some graphics, at the very least an icon or logo to be displayed on the smartphone, which may in
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