Data management

When preparing data recording sheets it is important to file them safely and to be able to visualise ahead how the data will be analysed. For a student tackling a research project this is not an easy task, and, as will be seen at the end of this data management section, mistakes were made in this MSc project.

Recordings on snail counts and environmental variable values were initially entered into recording sheets as shown below. This is essentially as displayed in CS14Data1 except that it would in hindsight have been better to record counts for the different snail species in different columns to ease the entry of data into the spread sheet. Otherwise, the layout of the sheet proved to be fine for analysis.