Using Questionnaires for Monitoring the Environment Status

Abstract

SUMMARY The ecology and the monitoring of the environment status are becoming important concerns for many government agencies and NGO’s involved in the durable development policies. In this domain, the data-collection activity plays an important role and we want to propose a system based on the new available technologies like portable devices, wireless data transfer and positioning systems. Another aspect is the precision of the collected data. For improving this aspect, we propose a system based on questionnaires developed and maintained by a group of supervisors in a central database system. Field operations are becoming much simpler because the operator has to respond to a series of questionnaires containing in most cases, a question and mutually exclusive answers. The GPS technology and the software developed for the portable devices used by the field operators, are automatically attaching positioning data and temporal marks to the answers. This supplementary information is very useful for a good interpretation of the collected data and for filtering the questionnaires that are presented to the operator. GPS data is also useful for interfacing the data collection system with maps and sattelite images databases available like Google Earth, Microsoft Virtual Earth or others. Wireless communications like GPRS/EDGE or 3G that are covering most of the territory are used to syncronize data between the portable devices (for example PDAs having Microsoft Windows Mobile onboard) and the central server. During the syncronization process, the device will receive the questionnaires and it will send back the answers. The software developed for the devices can work also offline and syncronize data only from time to time when wireless communications are possible. On the server side, other software applications are evaluating collected data and run statistical analysis on it, data comparison with the past years, and helping this way the decision makers to detect the trends in the environment changes and also emergency situations. Obviously the quality and usefulness of the collected data and analysis results is much dependent on the well designed questions and the statistical analysis methods used for the interpretation of the results.