Glanville fritillary butterfly survey: database and software infrastructure

The long-term research on the Glanville fritillary butterfly (Melitaea cinxia, http://www.helsinki.fi/science/metapop/Species/Cinxia.htm) in the Åland Islands (http://www.helsinki.fi/science/metapop/Field_sites/Aland.htm) in SW Finland was started in 1991. This study encompasses the entire distribution of the species in Finland in a network of ca 4,000 habitat patches (dry meadows) within an area of 50 x 70 km. The survey of all local populations in the entire network was started in 1993 and has provided a unique record of long-term and large-scale dynamics of a species inhabiting a fragmented landscape as well as material for specific observational and experimental studies. The Glanville fritillary has become an internationally recognized model system for metapopulation biology due to the many significant contributions to the literature that this project has made over the past decade (reviewed by Hanski 1999, Metapopulation Ecology, Oxford University Press, and many chapters in the volume edited by Ehrlich and Hanski in 2004, On the Wings of Checkerspots). Since 2007, we have conducted laboratory experiments at the Lammi Biological Station, where we have 600 m 2 of space for rearing of plants and caterpillars and doing experiments. Since 2006, we have integrated molecular and genomics studies into the ecological research.

Over the course of almost 20 years we have evolved our methods of data recording, storing and analysis from being 100% paper based (apart from GPS devices for recording geolocation data) in the field with subsequent digitization by hand back in the office all the way to being fully digital.

in this poster we will give a brief overview of a complete digital workflow that we deploy to prepare our field setup (netbooks and GPS devices), customize the software (EarthCape) for a particular type of field work, use the software and maps for navigation and data recording, merging data coming from field working for realtime crosschecking and validation, data recording during experiments in butterfly rearing lab, multi user setup for data access in the office, and data publication using web access to our database.