Review Data Collection Requirements

Coordinate System - the uploaded data should all be projected into a lat/long Geographic coordinate system with NAD 83 (North American Datum 1983) as the datum. Please ensure that the values in the attribute tables' X and Y fields (if uploading transect files) are in decimal degrees and not some other unit such as UTM meters.

The data must be collected in one or both of the formats as discussed in "How to Survey for Good PO Maps".  If the transect method is used, then the resulting attribute table (in ArcGIS, Excel, Access etc.) needs to be adjusted to the following format (Table 1).  Field Names (which represent your column headers) are CASE SENSITIVE, and the data in each field must be of the type described below in the “Field Type” column.  For more detail on what each Field Name represents, click here

Table 1. Data requirements for the transect method.

If the point and polygon method is used, one can either upload weed polygons or points, but a survey area shapefile is absolutely critical. These shapefiles should contain the following fields:

Table 2. Data requirements for the point and polygon method.

For the survey area shapefile, the SPECIES_1, SPECIES_2, etc. fields should represent the surveyed species (Table 3). For the point and polygon shapefiles, they should represent the species which were found at each sampled point (Table 4).

Table 3.  Survey area shapefile data table

Table 4. Weed Points/polygons data table

Go on to step 3 of 6