My daughter Laine and I went out on the lake tonight for a gentle paddle.  Partway through, as we were investigating what I think is a hawk’s nest, we found a type of fern I hadn’t seen in this area before.  I brought home a sample to determine it’s type, and was reminded of some nature walks we’d taken together earlier this year.

On those walks we looked for interesting flora, and collected data on our expedition.  We took a GPS, a couple of digital cameras, and mapped our journey and the results.  But how to organize and display this data once we’d collected it?  I’ve been using Microsoft’s OneNote extensively to manage my time and track the various projects I’m involved in - would it prove a convenient digital repository?

It did marvelously.  I based each page off of a map or photo of the samples, and surrounded it with small pictures and text augmenting and explaining the data there.  Add some hand-drawn lines over the top (wish I had a tablet for that) and I have a very nice record of our discoveries, in a fashion that highlights the most important data but also allows for supporting details.  Here are a couple of samples - a walk down our Secret Trail to where fungus abounded, and a hike with pony down to the local Waterfall, where we collected and identified several types of ferns.  (MSN spaces doesn’t seem to allow me to upload such wide and tall screenshots without shrinking them - bummer.  I’ve just included a teaser to encourage you to click the links for the full-size JPGs stored elsewhere.)

OneNote packages all the data (maps, images, text, spreadsheets and GPS files) in a single file, without losing resolution (I can size up the photos later to see more detail).  This makes it handy to archive, move to other computers, and so forth.  All in all, it’s hard to imagine a substantially better digital notebook.

[Updated 6/10: moved screenshots to MSN Groups.]

[Updated 6/14: moved screenshots away from MSN Groups due to access restrictions.]