Observation forms for 2024

Submit your form after having observed ~20 families to prevent data loss

The forms are informed about the number of independent seed origins (families) that you have in your garden. In theory, you could submit a single form for your whole garden at once. However, we do not recommend this. This is because long forms (that loop through many families) are slow and unstable. Thereby the form will ask you how many families you would like to observe. We advise that you give a number around 20, which is the default value. The exact number doesn't matter and if you have a slow phone, you may choose less. Then, you will be be provided with the question about the germination rate and the developmental stages of the seedlings 20 times, once for each family. Complete these questions and submit your form! Then, you will be taken back to the starting page, and can start a new form for the following 20 families. When you are reaching the end of the nursery, you can count exactly how many families are left, and give that number in your last form. If you made a mistake, and you have less families than what you gave, simply choose the provenance "Other" and then "Not available", and 0 for the number of seedlings to "get out of the loop" and be able to finish the form.

Note that many Fagus gardens have 21 or less families. In these cases, the form will not ask you to give the number of families, but simply take you though all of them by default! In contrast, most Abies gardens have around 150 families, so here you will have to submit 7-8 forms.

What do I have to observe? Required and optional questions

Some of the questions are required some are optional. The required questions are the date, the observer's name, the garden ID, the number of families to be observed, the provenance, the family, and the number of seedlings in one quarter. All other questions are optional. Hint: If you can pass on to the next question without an answer, it means that question was not required. This will allow you to dose the work load according to your capacity. For example, if it is beyond your capacity to estimate the % of seedlings in the different developmental stages, you can leave these questions unanswered. Or, it is also sufficient to record the coordinates of the nursery once, for example, in the first form that you fill in for the first 20 families. Nevertheless, recording the coordinates in multiple forms will improve the precision. The form will also ask you to take a picture of the seedlings for each family (all 4 quarters together). You may or may not do this for all families, however, we encourage you to take a picture of each family as we maybe able to extract other information from these pictures later on.

Why do we use ENKETO and not the ODK Collect app?

For Android phones, there is an app called ODK Collect that can make the use the webforms much more convenient, however, we will not be able to use this for macro-garden observations for technical reasons. Briefly, with ODK the number of columns in the observation sheets must be identical to avoid data loss (see), while ENKETO simply fills in the missing columns with n/a values. Since the size of each macro-garden is different, so as the number of families to be observed, we have to use ENKETO to efficiently organize our data.