I'm a bit stuck on another problem with a form I'm trying to create for field data collection, coming here in the hopes that someone can help me brainstorm - this community has been such a great resource before on getting some fresh perspectives to help "get the wheels turning"!
Here's what I'm trying to do:
The team needs to collect vegetation data for quadrats along a transect. The number of quadrats will vary based on the length of the transect, so I need to allow it to be variable. At the end of collecting veg data in each quadrat, the AVERAGE percent cover for each species listed needs to be calculated for the whole transect. However, a species won't necessarily be found in every quadrat.
So, the schema I would like to do (for the best user interface) would be a repeat question (for quadrat number) with a nested repeat for vegetation. I need to identify all the species identified within the transect (no duplicates), and then, for each instance that species is observed, add the percent cover that was recorded for that species. Then divide that sum by the total number of transects to get the average percent cover for the species. I then need to be able to retrieve this value for each specific species to pull into a report, which I guess presents its own problems due to the variable nature of the number of species that will be observed in a quadrat.
I'm assuming a JavaScript function is the best way to approach this, perhaps something with dictionaries where key:value pairs are the species [key] and percent cover [value]. But I'm just struggling a bit on how to get to the "next step" in developing that. This is where my inexperience really shows...
Any thoughts are greatly appreciated!!!
Best,
Katie
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