Project Information Interface#

If you are navigating back to the Project Information (not visiting right after project creation), you can reach this page by finding your Institution on the Home page left panel. Click the [Edit] icon next to the project name to get to the Project Information/Review Project page.

The Project Information Interface has two components: Project Details on the left and Project Management on the right.

Project Details#

The Project Detail pane includes an overview of your project, including sample collection design, imagery selection, the AOI boundary, and survey questions.

  • The Collection Design will now show the location of a subset of your plots (a maximum number can be displayed).

  • The Plot Design and Sample Design sections will show a summary of the choices you made or the .csv and .shp files you uploaded.

  • Survey Questions shows all the Survey Cards you created, along with the corresponding Component Type, Answers, and Rules.

  • You can preview the Learning Material by using the [View Interpretation Instructions] button. This feature can be implemented in existing projects by editing the project and adding text to the Learning Materials text box.

    Preview your material by clicking on the View Interpretation Instructions button in the Project Details pane.

Project Management#

The Project Management pane includes project publication information and important links to manage your project.

Publication status#

The publication status includes the Date Created, Date Published, and Date Closed for your project. If your project is not published yet, the Date Published will not be present. There is also text describing your project status:

  • Draft Mode projects: This project is in draft mode. Admins can review, edit, and test collecting the project. Publish the project in order for users to begin collection. Any data collected in a Draft Mode project will not be retained.

  • Published projects: This project is published. Users can begin collecting. Limited changes to the project details can be made. Close the project to prevent anymore updates.

  • Closed projects: This project is closed. The project is closed to all changes. Reopen the project for additional collection.

Tip

We suggest testing your project extensively while in draft mode. Check that you are asking all of your desired questions, rules are correct, and you have the desired plot and sample design.

When you are completely happy with your project, that is the best time to publish it.

Modify Project Details#

Next, examine the important links for your project:

  • Publish Project: Clicking on this will publish your project and allow users to collect data. Note that if a project is not “Published” only the admins of the institution can see it, not the members.

  • Close Project: If you have a published project, you can close it and stop data collection by clicking this button.

  • Edit Project: This button will take you back to the project creation wizard (see Project Creation).

    • When your project is in DRAFT MODE, you can change all aspects of your project.

    • When your project is PUBLISHED, you can change the Project Overview options, Imagery options, Add New Plots in Plot Design, and add new Survey Questions. If you need to make more substantial changes, we suggest using the Copy Entire Project feature to create a new project based on the existing one.

  • Delete Project: This will permanently delete your project.

Tip

If you accidentally publish a faulty project, you can either revise it or use it as the template for a revised project and not lose all your work.

Export Data#

There are four data download options, Download Plot Data, Download QA/QC Data, Download Sample Data, and Download Shape Files as well as the option to Copy Entire Project

Note

Data downloaded from CEO will be in WGS84 EPSG:4326 format.

[Download Plot Data] downloads your data with all samples summarized by plot. It is downloaded in .csv, which can be opened in programs like Microsoft Excel or imported into data analysis software. Downloaded columns will be:

  • plotid: the CEO-assigned unique sample plot number or the user provided Plot ID (for .csv and .shp files).

  • center_lon and center_lat are the geographic coordinates of the center of your sample plots.

  • size_m and shape describe the size in meters and the shape (circle or square) of the sample plot.

  • sample_points indicates the number of samples in each plot.

  • email is the user id (email address) of the person that classified the plot.

  • flagged: This will be FALSE for plots where data was collected. It will be TRUE when a user has flagged the quality of the background map as not good enough to analyze the samples (e.g. due to clouds or poor image resolution).

    • Plots can either be flagged or saved by a user, but not both.

    • If a user flags the plot, then goes back and enters data and saves the plot, the plot will not be flagged.

  • flagged_reason: A user provided reason for flagging the plot.

  • confidence: Collected user confidence, if enabled.

  • collection_time: date and time the user collected the plot data. Time in UTC.

  • analysis_duration: Amount of time, in seconds, the user spent analyzing the plot.

  • common_securewatch_date: Most common SecureWatch date used.

  • total_securewatch_date: Number of SecureWatch dates used.

Note

If you used SecureWatch imagery, this will be the date that was most commonly used by the user when classifying the plot. If you did not use SecureWatch imagery, this will be blank. Now that SecureWatch imagery is deprecated, this column will not be populated in new projects.

  • If you used a .csv or .shp file for plot design, any additional data columns you uploaded will be preserved in the .csv download. They will be preceded by pl_(column name).

  • All the following columns will have information about each of the survey questions broken down by answer. They are labeled QUESTION TEXT:ANSWER TEXT. For example, LULC:Built Surface would indicate that “LULC” was the question and “Built Surface” was the answer.

    • In the plot summary download, these are quantified as percent (max 100) of the sample points in the plot that were assigned that answer.

    • For example, suppose you have four sample points within your plot and two answers (e.g. land cover class) to choose from. If one sample point is assigned to one answer and the other three points to the second answer, the data when downloaded will say ‘25’ for the first answer and ‘75’ for the second answer.

    • For proactive sampling, percentages are based on sample count, NOT AREA.

[Download QA/QC Data] is only shown when multiple data collectors have collected data for the same plot(s). This option downloads only the duplicated plot data for QA/QC review in .csv format. The columns included are the same as those described in Download Plot Data above, but only data for the duplicated plots will be included.

[Download Sample Data] downloads your raw data, with information for each sample point within each plot as its own row. If you would like your plot data analyzed differently, the Download Sample Data option is a better fit. Sample data is downloaded in .csv, which can be opened in programs like Microsoft Excel or imported into data analysis software.

Downloaded .csv data from Download Sample Data will have the following columns:

  • plotid: the CEO-assigned unique sample plot number or the user provided Plot ID (for .csv and .shp files).

  • sampleid: the CEO-assigned unique sample point number or the user provided Sample ID (for .csv and .shp files).

  • sample_internal_id: the internal sample ID used by CEO.

  • lon and lat are the geographic coordinates of the center of your sample points.

  • email is the user id (email address) of the person that classified the plot. If the interpreter was not logged in, this field will say “guest”.

  • flagged: This will be FALSE for plots where data was collected and for plots where data has not been collected yet. It will be TRUE when a user has flagged the quality of the background map as not good enough to analyze the samples (e.g. due to clouds or poor image resolution).

  • collection_time: The date and time when the user classified the plot. Time zone is UTC.

  • analysis_duration: Time in seconds that the user took to analyze the plot.

  • imagery_title: Name of the Imagery layer that the user had selected when saving the plot.

  • imagery_attributions: Any attribution for the imagery used.

Note

If multiple imagery sources were used, only the name of the last imagery layer used will be recorded. There is no way to know all the layers used by the user, e.g. if you want to check that two years of imagery were used.

Note

Note that imagery properties are associated with samples (not plots) because users are free to change these properties while classifying samples. Thus, any given plot may have some of its samples classified with one map image and other samples classified with a different map image.

  • sample_geom: The geometry of the sample point in WKT format.

  • confidence: Collected user confidence, if enabled.

  • confidence_comment: Collected user confidence comment, if enabled.

  • If you used a .csv or .shp file for sample plot design, any additional data columns you uploaded will be preserved in the .csv download. They will be preceded by PL_(column name).

  • If you used a .csv or .shp file for sample point design, any additional data columns you uploaded will be preserved in the .csv download. They will be preceded by SMPL_(column name).

  • All the following columns will have information about each of the survey questions. They will be labeled QUESTION TEXT, where question text is the literal text of the question.

  • Guest Interpreters: If your project allowed guest interpreters (users not registered with an account), their data will be included in both the plot and sample data downloads. This column indicates TRUE if the data was collected by a guest interpreter and FALSE if it was collected by a registered user.

[Download Shape File] downloads a zip file with two folders: plot-shape-file and sample-shape-file. Each file contains a corresponding shapefile, consisting of .shp, .cpg, .dbf, .prj, and .shx files. Column (feature) information includes:

  • PROJECT_ID: The project ID number from CEO.

  • PLOT_ID: This is the internal plot ID used by CEO. It corresponds with the plotid column in the .csv download.

  • SAMPLE_ID: For the sample-shape-file only, the user assigned sample ID number.

  • SAMPLE_INT: The internal sample ID used by CEO. It corresponds with the sample_internal_id column in the .csv download.

Using this information, you can join the shapefile with the plot or sample .csv information using a desktop GIS application such as QGIS or ArcGIS. You could also use a web-based application such as Google Earth Engine.

[Copy Entire Project] lets you create an exact copy of the project, including plots, widgets, and existing answers. You are then able to edit any part of the new project.

Copy Entire Project creates a brand new project in your Institution under the name of the original project with “- COPY” appended to the end. You can then edit any portion of the project within the Project Setup Wizard. By default, the copied project is unpublished.

You will be given three options:

  • Use Existing Plots: Keep this selected (marked with the checkbox) if you do NOT what to change any of the plots. Unselect this option to generate new plots, including using CEO’s built in system.

  • Use Existing Widgets: Keep this selected to maintain all Geo-Dash widgets from the original projects

  • Copy Answers: Keep this selected if you would like all original answers to also be copied to the new project. If you unselect this option, only the Survey Questions are copied. Collections will begin at the first plot.

Copy project options

When you are finished making any desired changes, select [Revew] and [Update Project]. You will be asked if you want to clear the collection data. Unselect the checkbox if you do not want to clear the data. Then click Confirm.

Collection data will be cleared to reset the project.

Digital Object Identifier#

Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) are unique identifiers that help keep track of objects—digital, physical, or abstract. For example, DOIs can be assigned GitHub code, peer-reviewed papers, or to data sets like those generated by users in CEO.

DOIs consist of a unique number made up of a prefix, a forward slash, and a suffix. For example, the DOI for the peer-reviewed paper describing CEO is: 10.1016/j.envsoft.2019.05.004. A DOI enables unique and persistent identification and tracking of CEO datasets.

CEO’s implementation of DOIs is strictly opt-in, meaning that users must choose to publish their data. CEO uses Zenodo’s API, allowing for rich metadata functionality.

Create DOI will automatically send collection data and the plot/sample shape files to Zenodo.

Publish DOI will make the created DOI public. We suggest you click this after collecting all of your data, completed all QAQC, and have a final, high quality dataset. You can publish more than one DOI for a project.

Note

A project may only have a DOI created if it is published or closed.

On the project review page, you can copy the DOI reference and look for it on either https://doi.org or on https://zenodo.org. Remember that your reference consists of the prefix, forward slash, and the suffix. To view your DOI on DOI.org or Zenodo, simply search for your project’s DOI reference. You can find this information on your Project Information page under Overview.

The project dashboard.

CEO uploads the following information to Zenodo automatically:

  • Creator’s information (the administrator who created the DOI).

  • Contributor’s information (the email address of all users that collected data for the project).

  • The institution’s name.

  • The project’s name and description.

In addition, CEO uploads a zip file containing:

  • The survey answers both by plots and by samples in JSON format. This is the same information that you can download from CEO in CSV format.

  • Plot and sample shape files.

Warning

This metadata cannot easily be modified once the DOI is published. Please check your information to make sure it is accurate before publishing your DOI.

Last updated on Jan 22, 2026.