Development Of A PDA-Based Forest Inventory Data Collection Application

With the development of information technology and PDA hardware,PDA has become a new media for forest inventory data collection.Due to the limitation of PDA hardware,most of PDA-based data collection system only provides data entry functions,but not an overview of the data.After the launch of Windows Mobile 5.0 operating system,the functions can also run on PDA which can only run on PC.Content and workflow of forest inventory data collection have been investigated,and function requirements of data collection software have been specified.Having analyzing PDA hardware, software and the developing trends,a forest inventory data collection software that is independent of PC operating system was designed and implemented on Windows Mobile 5.0 or above,making more practical functions available for foresters.Visual Studio 2005 was applied as development platform,C# as development language,and SQL Mobile 2005 as database.Functions such as data entry,query, modify,and export as well as plot data overview are accessible.It supports a variety of data export formats,including XML,XLS,file formats and others,which made data analysis process more convenient.Data overview can show a plot data report,DBH statistical report and DBH-Height dot chart,which will give the foresters an instant general picture of data for error spotting and revising.The function,which is unique to former PDA data collection software,improves the efficiency and quality of fieldwork.Repeated tests have been carried out on the software in the process of development and after completion.Results showed that this software can run on PDA and Smartphone with operating system Windows Mobile 5.0 or above.The results of applying it in actual sample-plot data collection have showed that the system is a practical digital tool for field data collection,which reduce errors,minimize workload and enhance data quality.