Streamlining Nursery Inventory with IrisBG-ArcGIS Mobile | November Coffee Chat 2025

Our November Coffee Chat featured, Autumn Ayers the Manager of Horticulture & Collections at Descanso Gardens.  

In this session, Autumn explains how her IrisBG Database is set up so that she can make use of the IrisBG-ArcGIS Mobile in their nursery. She also explains how she uses the reports in IrisBG for color coded thermal printed tags with QR codes. 

Thanks to all of you who joined us! The Coffee Chat attendees were more experienced IrisBG users with 47% intermediate users, 35% advanced users, 12% novice and 6% trying out th trial. There was a wide range of experience with using ArcGIS and 40 percent of attendees are currently using the IrisBG-ArcGIS Mobile Solution.   The last chart below provided an opportunity for all attendees to list how often they would use mobile data collection for tasks in the garden.

The map below shows the gardens and arboreta represented by those who registered for the Coffee Chat - home offices not taken into consideration.   

Autumn shared screen shots from IrisBG showing how she created item type locations for her Nursery Items. 

Statuses that are specific to Item Types can be set. Once in Field Maps Designer, Autumn organized the available fields by required, optional, and propagation details. In the screenshot on the right you will see that Autumn cleverly added documentation into the Field Map, which helps other employees and volunteers understand what each field is for and explains any of the codes from IrisBG.

Q&A

Autumn has a dream to combine IrisBG with Field Maps and Survey123 with all of the changes monitored in a realtime Dashboard.  She raised to challenges to the group:

Q1: How to keep the settings in the dashboard when the feature service is reloaded?

A: I would recommend keeping a placeholder record in your nursery project. One that you do not import to IrisBG but keeps your settings in AGOL. It will need to have the nursery item type.

Q2: How to create a Survey123 that allows her volunteers and staff to check out records?

A: I would recommend setting up a 'repeat' in your Survey123 Connect form. Something that looks like this:

Note: You will need to work with the final spreadsheet to have it in an acceptable data import format.