A mobile phone application will help professional and "citizen" scientists collect and analyse data from "in the field", anywhere in the world.

The EpiCollect software collates data from certain mobiles - on topics such as disease spread or the occurrence of rare species - in a web-based database.

The data is statistically analysed and plotted on maps that are instantly available to those same phones.

The approach is outlined in the open-access journal PLoS ONE.

The software has been developed for so-called smartphones that run Google's Android open-source operating system.

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