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The universal field guide is an extensive mobile electronic field guide on the topic of birds of North America to which you can add more species information for your personal use or, preferably, for sharing with others. It is also a framework to integrate a wide variety of field guide topics (e.g., bird field guide, fern field guide, flower field guide) onto a single inexpensive flash memory card.
descriptionget more ...species informationAn electronic field guide covering a particular topic, such as birds of North America, and including an extensive amount of species information, including multimedia, has been an expensive proposition for developers as well as users. Development costs of $1 million and user costs of $30 per year are common. That development model does not scale well: not many users could afford 10 electronic field guide topics costing $300 per year. In contrast, the universal field guide development model scales well because it reuses the same executable for all guide topics (e.g., birds of North America, ferns of North America, flowers of North America) and therefore avoids the topic specific software development costs. Instead, the topic specific information is created with widely known tools, such as spreadsheet applications, and is linked together by the generic universal field guide application. The results are inexpensive electronic field guide development and, therefore, electronic field guides that can compete with paperback field guides in price. perspectives on species distributionIn Birding Essentials [2007; ISBN:9781426201356], Alderfer and Dunn wrote about the importance of understanding species distribution. "One of the most important aspects of birding, relevant to birders of all experience levels, is understanding status and distribution - where and when birds are found and how common or rare they are at different seasons." The universal field guide offers more than the typical thumbnail distribution maps.
flexible organization of informationIn Birding Essentials [2007; ISBN:9781426201356], Alderfer and Dunn wrote quite a bit about field guide organization. "The best field guides do not organize species from the front to back by color, or size, or habitat. Almost all [bird] field guides are organized in a similar fashion, based on taxonomy, following a scientific system of classification based on evolutionary relatedness. Similar species are grouped together because they share more recent common ancestors on an evolutionary time scale, not because they look similar. This is not an intuitive system, especially the sequencing of families from front to back. Become familiar with the sequence of families and know generally where they occur in your field guide to use it efficiently." "Many beginners ask, ‘Why don’t they arrange field guides by color? That’s what I see first and what’s most important to me.’ In chapter 2, we touched on why all the best field guides are arranged taxonomically with related species shown together. Briefly, there are so many variations within each species and among closely related species – between males and females, between different ages, between different times of the year – that arranging them by color would result in chaos. Not only would closely related species often be found sections apart, but birds with equal amounts of different colors would also get arbitrarily assigned to one or another group, and males and females would often get separated." Paperback field guides are constrained to one organization because their bound pages cannot be rearranged. However, one organization rarely suits all. In contrast, flexible organization is a strength of the universal field guide. Because it can quickly sort a list of species according to dozens of sort order options, it is indeed possible to “organize species from the front to back by color, or size, or habitat” or any number of attributes. Specifically, there is a two-step process to grouping similar species together in the ufg application.
up to date informationAs extraordinary as Newcomb's Wildflower Guide [1977, ISBN:0316604429] is, about 10 percent of the included scientific names have changed since its publication in 1977. The problem of updating scientific names is not limited to wildflower guides. In the 47-th supplement to the American Ornithologists’ Union (AOU) checklist published in July 2006, the AOU wrote “Changes of classification of entire genera, tribes, subfamilies, and even families will become more frequent as DNA evidence continues to provide new or confirm old concepts of relationships.” Each component of the universal field guide is designed for easy and efficient updating. Much like automobile replacement parts, ufg components are updated independently, as needed. And, the larger components (i.e., the topic text and the topic multimedia) can be differentially updated, saving time by changing only the subcomponents needing an update. identification keysTypically, field guides are organized according to a very small set of species attributes (e.g., the bird's position in the classification hierarchy, or the number of petals in a flower) that are used as keys to find groups of similar species in the guide. Instead of keys, the universal field guide implements projections that work on any available information. For example to identify a bird specimen, you check observations, such as location of sighting and plumage color, and then project those observations onto the classification list to see the list of candidate species. You can then project that list of candidate species onto the photo list to browse through their photos, ordered from most to least likely (according to eBird sighting statistics). What information is available for projecting? A lot. The birds of North America topic currently has over 320,000 links implemented. geographical coverage AND local focusThe geographical scope of a paperback field guide is usually a portion of the country (e.g., the birds of Western United States). In contrast, due to the storage capacity of today's flash memory, the geographical coverage of the universal field guide is the entire continent (e.g., birds of North America). Although it may initially seem counterintuitive, the universal field guide application offers greater geographical coverage at the same time as offering greater localization. With the geography list, users customize the universal field guide application to not only their region (e.g., Bird Conservation Region #29), but also to the current week of the year. And, because of the integration with the Species Inventory application, users can organize the universal field guide according to the species in their backyards. open standardsThe task of improving field guides on local and national scales is overly ambitious for any entity, public or private. For example, who has the resources to map the species along the nation's trails? Collaboration is the only conceivable path to success.
integrationMetcalfe's law is a formula that describes how the value of a network increases in proportion to the square of the number of connected users. Although field guides are generally not thought of as networks, the universal field guide implements hundreds of thousands of links between species attributes. Based upon user comments such as "The more I use your software the more excited I am to use it" it appears that the linked whole has more education value than the education value of the parts. After all, the universal field guide simply integrates a bunch of widely known species attributes and doesn't unveil anything new and exciting. The excitement is apparently due to Metcalfe's law. A universal field guide user study is starting to show how the universal field guide links are used. For more information about the study, see the link token description in the manual. ... with lessspaceIn the conclusion of 'The Origin of Species,' Charles Darwin wrote "It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us." The high storage capacity and the low cost of today's flash memory devices are enabling the documentation of the interesting complexity described by Darwin without requiring a backpack full of books. (Wireless communication may eventually become an alternative to physically carrying field guide information, when wireless coverage, speed, and cost improve.) moneyIn the field guide market, paperbacks dominate and have not faced much of a challenge from electronic field guides. However, each generation of electronic field guide is improving. The following table compares some recently developed electronic guides for birders. The universal field guide is one of the first to challenge paperback field guides on price as well as content.
getting startedThe no fuss approach to getting started is purchasing the multimedia on a 1-GByte SD card. (The card is already setup and the installation is automatic when you first insert the card.) However, fuss can be good. One of the advantages of the universal field guide is that it puts you in control of your field guide content: if there is a newly released field guide topic in which you are interested, just unzip the topic to your SD card. You learn how to update your SD card by setting it up yourself in the following steps.
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