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Field studies on arthropod ecology and behaviour require simple and robust monitoring tools, preferably with direct access to an integrated database. We have developed and here present a database tool allowing smart-phone based monitoring of arthropods. This smart phone application provides an easy solution to collect, manage and process the data in the field which has been a very difficult task for field biologists using traditional methods. To monitor our example species, the desert ant Cataglyphis fortis, we considered behavior, nest search runs, feeding habits and path segmentations including detailed information on solar position and azimuth calculation, ant orientation and time of day. For this we established a user friendly database system integrating the Ant-App-DB with a smart phone and tablet application, combining experimental data manipulation with data management and providing solar position and timing estimations without any GPS or GIS system. Moreover, the new desktop application Dataplus allows efficient data extraction and conversion from smart phone application to personal computers, for further ecological data analysis and sharing. All features, software code and database as well as Dataplus application are made available completely free of charge and sufficiently generic to be easily adapted to other field monitoring studies on arthropods or other migratory organisms. The software applications Ant-App-DB and Dataplus described here are developed using the Android SDK, Java, XML, C# and SQLite Database.

Field studies on arthropod ecology and behaviour require simple and robust monitoring tools, preferably with direct access to an integrated database. We have developed and here present a database tool allowing smart-phone based monitoring of arthropods. This smart phone application provides an easy solution to collect, manage and process the data in the field which has been a very difficult task for field biologists using traditional methods. To monitor our example species, the desert ant Cataglyphis fortis, we considered behavior, nest search runs, feeding habits and path segmentations including detailed information on solar position and Azimuth calculation, ant orientation and time of day. For this we established a user friendly database system integrating the Ant-App-DB with a smart phone and tablet application, combining experimental data manipulation with data management and providing solar position and timing estimations without any GPS or GIS system. Moreover, the new desktop application Dataplus allows efficient data extraction and conversion from smart phone application to personal computers, for further ecological data analysis and sharing. All features, software code and database as well as Dataplus application are made available completely free of charge and sufficiently generic to be easily adapted to other field monitoring studies on arthropods or other migratory organisms. The software applications Ant-App-DB and Dataplus described here are developed using the Android SDK, Java, XML, C# and SQLite Database.

Field studies on arthropod ecology and behaviour require simple and robust monitoring tools, preferably with direct access to an integrated database. We have developed and here present a database tool allowing smart-phone based monitoring of arthropods. This smart phone application provides an easy solution to collect, manage and process the data in the field which has been a very difficult task for field biologists using traditional methods. To monitor our example species, the desert ant Cataglyphis fortis, we considered behavior, nest search runs, feeding habits and path segmentations including detailed information on solar position and Azimuth calculation, ant orientation and time of day. For this we established a user friendly database system integrating the Ant-App-DB with a smart phone and tablet application, combining experimental data manipulation with data management and providing solar position and timing estimations without any GPS or GIS system. Moreover, the new desktop application Dataplus allows efficient data extraction and conversion from smart phone application to personal computers, for further ecological data analysis and sharing. All features, software code and database as well as Dataplus application are made available completely free of charge and sufficiently generic to be easily adapted to other field monitoring studies on arthropods or other migratory organisms. The software applications Ant-App-DB and Dataplus described here are developed using the Android SDK, Java, XML, C# and SQLite Database

Software design and sustainable software engineering are essential for the long-term development of bioinformatics software. Typical challenges in an academic environment are short-term contracts, island solutions, pragmatic approaches and loose documentation. Upcoming new challenges are big data, complex data sets, software compatibility and rapid changes in data representation. Our approach to cope with these challenges consists of iterative intertwined cycles of development (“ Butterfly” paradigm) for key steps in scientific software engineering. User feedback is valued as well as software planning in a sustainable and interoperable way. Tool usage should be easy and intuitive. A middleware supports a user-friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI) as well as a database/tool development independently. We validated the approach of our own software development and compared the different design paradigms in various software solutions.

Software design and sustainable software engineering are essential for the long-term development of bioinformatics software. Typical challenges in an academic environment are short-term contracts, island solutions, pragmatic approaches and loose documentation. Upcoming new challenges are big data, complex data sets, software compatibility and rapid changes in data representation. Our approach to cope with these challenges consists of iterative intertwined cycles of development (“ Butterfly” paradigm) for key steps in scientific software engineering. User feedback is valued as well as software planning in a sustainable and interoperable way. Tool usage should be easy and intuitive. A middleware supports a user-friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI) as well as a database/tool development independently. We validated the approach of our own software development and compared the different design paradigms in various software solutions.