Workflows & Automation

Digital Ecology: improving the efficiency of ecological data management.

Data are a key asset in ecology, underpinning analysis and assessments that inform crucial decisions to improve biodiversity. However, managing this ever-growing volume of data can be time-consuming for ecologists. One of the huge advantages of digital technology lies in its capacity to automate tasks, including data cleaning, analysis, and report production, not only saving time, but also minimising the risk of manual errors whilst enhancing reproducibility.

At Digital Ecology, our mission is clear: to empower ecologists to do what they do best – carry out surveys, undertake ecological assessments, and provide their clients with high quality advice. Our automated workflow services are designed to help you spend less time worrying about data, and more time delivering those vital services to your clients.

One of the huge advantages of programming languages is the ability to automate tasks. This could include data cleaning, data analysis, and report production. Automation saves you time, reduces manual errors and facilitates reproducibility.

We are on a mission to turn repetitive data tasks into automated workflows, giving you more time to spend on creative solutions to environmental problems. Take advantage of modern open source data science tools to automate common data tasks, such as data cleaning, transformation and presentation

Our tools and services

Using open source software, we create tools that can automate data management analysis and presentation tasks. These include:

  • analysis and presentation of bat static detector data

  • automated condition assessment for BNG

  • automated report production

  • automated mapping

  • and much more!

These products and services save time and reduce errors when reporting on complex ecological information, allowing ecologists to focus more time and energy on collecting data, or solving ecological problems – and ultimately providing better outcomes for nature.

Projects that have benefited from our dynamic reporting systems

Local Wildlife Site Reporting System

Digital Ecology created a system for generating Local Wildlife Site citations and survey reports for North East Yorkshire Ecological Data Centre. Previously reports were created by hand on demand, which for over 2,000 sites was a considerable undertaking. Digital Ecology created a system where a single report can be generated in a couple of minutes and all 2,000+ plus reports can be generated in a few hours.

The system means it is really easy for NEYEDC to create these reports, as well as keep them up-to-date when new information are received after each survey season.

You can watch a presentation that Digital Ecology Director, Dan Carpenter, gave about this system here.

Habitat condition assessments for BNG

Digital Ecology have created a system for automating habitat condition assessments for Adonis Blue Environmental Consultants. This system uses MerginMaps to collect data in the field on condition criteria which are then copied to a database. Digital Ecology have written a tool that then takes these data and carried out a condition assessment using these data.

The tool provide both a condition score for a habitat polygon in GIS, as well as a report with the condition scores and data for each criterion in a condition assessment, which can be appended to a BNG report.

This system allows ABEC to carry out a huge number of surveys of habitat parcels in a survey season and create robust and standardised condition assessment for each habitat parcel in a fraction of the time it would take to do it by hand.

The tool is in active development, but Digital Ecology aim to offer it to other ecologists undertaking habitat surveys. The QGIS project on which the tool is based has been made open source by Digital Ecology and ABEC and can be accessed on Codeberg.