Web-based electronic surveys constitute an established and indispensable method of gathering voluntary contributions to research data from population samples of variable sizes. Recent research suggests that electronic surveys can be more effective, as compared to traditional forms of surveying, in terms of flexibility, cost, and several other factors. These facts are confirmed by the industry in the form of an abundance of commercial survey management packages and of highly adopted commercial use of web-based electronic surveys.

The VIVA Survey Management Toolkit presented in this thesis is a web-based electronic survey management system designed to be integrated in the Nevada Climate Change Data Portal that is being built at the University of Nevada, Reno as a part of the NSF EPSCoR funded project Nevada Infrastructure for Climate Change Science, Education and Outreach. Besides the integration requirement, a major emphasis in designing VIVA was placed on exploring technologies and techniques that would expand or otherwise enhance the current state-of-the-art of survey management tools.

The thesis presents the detailed software requirements, use case modeling, and software design of VIVA and illustrates the toolkit in action through a step-by-step example of creating and distributing a survey and analyzing the results obtained. A comparison with related work and a set of possible directions of future exploration are also included in the thesis.