At the core of informed decision-making is the collection of quality data which includes variables that respond to management questions. In the fisheries and water management area, we are typically faced with two issues associated with data. One, there aren’t any data available or two, the data exist, but are in many different and poorly-coordinated formats.
To remedy the problems associated with the lack of appropriate information available it is important to properly design and execute field studies to gather the targeted data. At PAEC, we have broad experience in designing and collecting field data. Many of these data collections are done in collaboration with resource managers so that traditional techniques and new processes can be effectively blended together.
The second problem is the data are available, but they are stored in different and sometime incompatible formats. It is not unusual to find data in old paper reports, some in legacy software, while some are available in modern databases. Faced with this problem, it may be tempting to use only the most recent data because of the time and difficulty of accessing the historical data. We can help by performing literature surveys and converting the paper data to searchable digital data so that you may harness the full power of the data available to you.
PAEC can help with:
- Survey design
- Field studies
- Literature searches
- Paper to digital data conversion