Online Prairie Data Directions for Entering Your Quadrat Data

• If you are not on a page titled Enter Your Data: Find Your Teacher/Leader with your Teacher/Leader and Class/Group listed at the top, then
  • Go to the page titled Studying a Real Prairie - Quadrat Study.

  • Find the section titled Gathering and Reporting Your Data and click on Enter your data.

  • Click on Find Your Teacher/Leader.

• Click on your teacher/leader's name. This makes an empty quadrat data page for you to fill in.

• Record the Quadrat ID found in the upper left of the Web Page on your Data Collection Sheet and Grid Sheet.

• Start with prairie plant number 1 (at Start here->). You must fill data from the top down. Do not start in the middle! It may give data entry errors. If you made mistakes, click the "Clear Form" button at the bottom or click the browsers "reload page" button in the navigation menu bar at the top of the page. Do the following:
  Click and hold down on pull down menu labeled Choose Plant.

  A list of plant names or categories will appear. Slide down to highlight the plant's name, then let go to select it.

  Click once in the Number Found box. How many of those plants did you find? Enter the number.

  Click in the Percent Cover box and enter the percent of the quadrat covered by those plants. NOTE: Do not type percent signs with your data. If you found less than 1 percent, round up to 1 if it is greater than or equal .5% and down to 0 if it less than .5%.

Go on to prairie plant 2, 3, etc. following the same steps for each. If you do not find your plant in the Choose Plant pull down menu, you can enter it as Plant 13 or 14. Stop filling in native prairie plant data when you have entered all the native plants from your data collection sheet.

Next move down to the invasives. Start with number 1 following the same steps as you did for the prairie plants. Don't forget that some of the invasives are by category. Lump their data together. Most invasives not found in Choose Invasives pull-down menu should be included in one of the four unlisted categories at the bottom of the pull-down menu. If you have a invasive that is not shown in the menu and it is extremely prevalent, you can send email to prairie-data@fnal.gov to add it to the list of invasives. Indicate the plant name, quadrat number, number found, and percent found.

When you are done entering your data, ask your teacher or group leader to approve it. Here's a sample.

Click the Submit Data button. Be patient! All your data is being entered in a database. You will activity in the browser icon and a status message indicating that it is contacting the server.

Wait for a new page to be displayed and use the menus provided on that page to select New Quadrat, Change Teacher/Group Leader or Prairie Data.

Keep your original data collection sheets.

Database Maintainer: prairie-data@fnal.gov
Web Maintainer: ed-webmaster@fnal.gov
Last Updated: August 16, 2000
http://www-ed.fnal.gov/data/life_sci/data/entry_directions.shtml