Tool: Operations Dashboard ArcGIS, Survey123 for ArcGIS, ArcGIS Online Technique: XLSForm programming, web application development

The northern highland communities of Lun Bawang have been collaborating with WWF-Malaysia under the Sarawak Conservation Programme (SCP) to empower sustainable economies and managing their natural biodiversity through the Community Empowerment Strategy (formerly known as Community Engagement and Education Strategy).

Since 2016, the communities have been actively mapping out their land uses and culturally important locations to delineate their areas of settlement and source of livelihood. Given the close vicinity of their communities to the licensed timber concessions, producing a definitive map is important to preserve and conserve their surrounding natural capitals.

Several outreach has been done and the community mapping effort has been shifted to implement citizen science via the Survey123 for ArcGIS mobile application which is apart of the ArcGIS ecosystem. This enables the local community to collect information despite the lack of network reception and the data can still be synchronized upon availability automatically or manually shared with the field officers.

Accurate data collection is the bedrock of any successful scientific inquiry. However, doing so at scale can be incredibly challenging. The complexity of this task makes picking the right tool critical for success. Survey123 makes this decision easy. It’s simple intuitive interface belies a robust and flexible data collection and analysis platform that makes even the most of daunting of tasks’ a cinch.

Developed by ESRI, Survey123 is available on both mobile (IOS and Android) and desktop platforms (PC & Mac & Linux).

 The big question to ask is why Survey123 since there are a plethora of applications that provide similar services, and the answer is simple- survey123 is as efficient as any of its competitors, and it’s integrated with the ArcGIS platform-the premier mapping software for analyzing and visualization of data.

 Data Collection made Easy

Let’s dive into data collection with Survey123. Survey123 allows users to create customizable forms compatible with Microsoft excel spread sheets. Users can upload forms created in excel directly into Survey123. Survey123 also powers data collection through image attachments and geo location (longitude and latitude). The image below shows all features available in Survey123 for creating forms:

                                            Real time Visualization and Analyzing of data made simple

 One of the beauties of Survey123 is its ability to sync data collected directly into ArcGIS for visualization and real-time analysis. This means data is immediately available on the ArcGIS platform. The ArcGIS platform utilizes a variety of tools to better analyze and understand data.  The figure below shows a sample visualization where the red dot indicates the location I collected data using Survey 123.

 How Survey123 is being employed around the globe

Despite its recent depute, Survey123 is already gaining considerable traction. It has been used in public health, public safety, water-safety and many other domains. In fact, Survey123 powered over 60,000 polio surveys that were administered by the World Health Organization in its campaign against Polio in Iraq. Remarking on the usefulness of Survey123, Jawameer Kakakhan of the World Health Organization(WHO) said “Survey123 for ArcGIS proved to be an end-to-end solution that covers authoring the form, accurate and real-time data collection, analysis, and visualization.”

Concluding Remarks