The manager picks an area where the survey will occur, and makes a new survey record including the polygon of the area. For example polygon #15: At this point the survey record has no plants and no observations in it. The manager notes the record number of the new survey; for example, svy10001.

Getting ready for field work, each member of the crew uses Background Lines and Polygons application to load polygon #15 into the Observer Pro app on their phones:

The crew is using a form that includes the Survey ID attribute (such as Advanced Search for Plants). Once they are in the field, each member of the crew enters the record number of the new survey (eg. svy10001) into the Survey ID field on the form. Note that this field is sticky; once you enter a value into it, the value will stay for all observations you make until you change it.

When the crew uploads their observations, they automatically become part of the new survey.

Once field work is complete, the manager edits the new survey record, and checks the observations. The manager uses PLANT LIST / Update / Add plants from observations to construct a plant list from the plant names in the observations.

Getting ready for an annual survey of a park, the manager prepares study area polygons. Each study area is a place inside of the park where weeds are likely to be found, based on the record of previous years.

For this year's survey, 30 study area polygons were prepared. Data will be collected for this survey over the period of a week. The manager reviews all study area polygons in the Shape Editor:

and assigns a crew to cover each study area.

Crew #1 is assigned to look for weeds in study area polygon #15:

Each member of Crew #1 uses the Background Lines and Polygons application to load that polygon into the Observer Pro app on their phones: so that while they are out in the field, they can easily determine when they are inside of the assigned study area.

Over the course of two days, Crew #1 enters 23 observations of weeds. These records are viewable to anyone in the group through the Group Observations application:

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When the data collection period is over and all crews have completed their assignments, the manager makes a survey reocrd to summarize the data collected.

First, the manager uses the Shape Editor to combine all of the study area polygons into a multi polygon:

Then the manager uses Survey Entry to make a new survey record, using the multi polygon as the area of the survey. The manager adds all of the observations that were made in the survey area during the data collection period to the survey: