At Osa Conservation, sea turtle research has been going on for at least ten years. As I have presented earlier, they have been storing the data in spreadsheets. I am still busy with the first problem they asked me to tackle, which his putting the data from about 100 tables together in two or three.
The other problem was that they were wondering if there is a way to make sure that from now on, everybody uses the same structure and formatting.
To me the obvious answer is, yes, you can create a relational database, put it on-line and enter data from the beach through a mobile phone. And if there is no coverage on the beach, you enter and store the data temporarily on a phone or tablet and then synchronize it with the database once you can connect them.
If one gets an idea like that at the end of the second decade of the 21st century, the next thing to do is checking if such a thing does not already exist? After all sea turtle research and projects like this have been with us for decades and decades, so perhaps someone else has already built something similar.
I went looking on the internet, and … surprise … someone did. In fact multiple actors did. In soon to be published posts, I will briefly introduce and discuss them one by one in chronological order because the history tells a story in itself. They all have their pro’s and con’s, as I will discuss.
All posts will start with the unpronounceable acronym STRDs so you can recognize them easily and dive in. Well, actually, you could pronounce it as ‘streds’ or ‘sturds’.
Next up is part 2 : The state of the world’s sea turtles (SWOT)
THE FLIP FLOP LIFE 
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