Transect line-intercept data is only recoverable at the moment of collection. Once you're back at the vehicle and the tide has moved, what was a sharp boundary between exposed mud and pneumatophore zone is now an indistinct waterline and a memory.
What Gets Lost Between the Transect and the Spreadsheet
The standard paper datasheet for line-intercept transect work has a substrate table with two columns: type and distance. Field teams fill it in, carry it back, and then someone transcribes it. The transcription step is where "Rhiz prop roots" becomes "Rhizophora," "Rhizophora prop-root zone," or "prop root substrate" depending on who is typing. Three entry conventions for the same substrate type means three separate filter categories in your analysis, and the summary stats don't add up.
This template fixes that at the source. Transect Line: Substrate type #1 through #8 are free-text fields — no forced vocabulary — but they're individual fields, one per substrate, rather than a free-form notes block. The discipline of filling in one type per field, rather than writing a run-on description, produces consistent records even when different ecologists are surveying different plots.
Start point and End point are separate integer fields per substrate, not a range entered as text like "12–27m." That distinction makes coverage calculations direct arithmetic. End #1 minus Start #1 gives you substrate length without parsing. Eight substrates summed across a 50-meter transect gives you a coverage check — if the total doesn't reach 50 meters, something was missed.
The Record Before the Transect Starts
Triplicate No. (1, 2, 3) and Plot (A, B, C) sit at the top of the record before the transect data. This is the administrative scaffolding that prevents the most common field data error: two surveyors working two plots on the same day and entering records that look identical except for the transect measurements.
Coordinates (Base) is the fixed point from which the transect runs — not the surveyor's GPS location when they opened the app, but the permanent base marker position. In mangrove systems where the substrate shifts between visits, the base coordinate is the only stable reference for comparing substrate coverage across time. A 3-meter error in base relocation produces 6% coverage error on a 50-meter transect.
Tide at the record level — Low or High — is the metadata that separates structural habitat data from observation-condition data. A pneumatophore zone that's 4 meters wide at low tide reads as 0 meters at high tide when it's submerged. The tide state tells the analyst which condition the record represents.
When the Template Is Just the Transect
The BC Mangrove Transect template isolates the substrate transect data from the tree-level biometric data that appears in the full Triplicate template. That separation is intentional when the monitoring protocol runs transect surveys and tree plot surveys on different schedules or with different personnel. A junior field technician can complete a transect record accurately. The DBH/COD tree measurement protocol requires a trained ecologist.
Running them as separate templates rather than combined records means the transect dataset remains clean and analyzable even during periods when tree survey data is incomplete.