Andrew Cottam, World Conservation Monitoring Centre, UK with Szabolcs Nagy (Wetlands

Andrew Cottam, World Conservation Monitoring Centre, UK with Szabolcs Nagy (Wetlands International) and Vicky Jones (Birdlife International)

The Critical Site Network (CSN) tool is a web mapping application whose

purpose is to support the conservation of migratory birds in the Africa-Eurasian

region. The CSN tool brings together a number databases from a range of

organisations to provide information on the most important sites for migratory

bird species. Up until now this data was not widely accesible or integrated so it

was difficult to understand where the most important sites were and which

ones should be conservation priorities. This web mapping application has been

designed to address these issues by bringing the data together in both an

intuitive and powerful way.

The main audiences for the CSN tool are Bird-related NGOs, government

policy-makers, local conservation organisation managing wildlife sites,

researchers and scientists. Each of these users has a discrete set of questions

that can be addressed by the CSN tool.

In overall terms the main objectives of the site are to:

• Highlight the most important sites for a species flyway

• Understand which sites are important at which times of the year

• Identify which sites are protected and which ones need protection

• Investigate how these factors are affected by external threats, land uses etc.

The following paragraphs describe the main features of the CSN tool and how

they have been designed and incorporated into the site to promote its wide

use.

Accessibility

The CSN tool will be used in much of the Africa-Eurasian region and this means

that it must be accessible by users within those countries. Therefore, the

application is multi-lingual and supports English, French, Russian and Arabic

(although the translations have not been competed yet in French or Arabic). In

addition, the Bing base maps that include labels will be shown in French if the

language is set to French.

User Experience

In order to make the site as engaging as possible, a number of external Web

Services have been used in the CSN tool. For bird species, the Flickr Image Web

Services have been used and for sites, the Panoramio Image Web Services have

been used.

The tool also includes many UI features to make the site intuitive including the

following: windows style dialog boxes that can be dragged and dropped; a

reporting tool that uses a set of filters that always produces matching results;

synchronisation between tabular data and the map display; colour coding used

throughout to show species status.

Performance

The CSN tool uses information from a number of large global databases,

including the World Database on Protected Areas and one of the key

considerations has been performance. To enable a responsive UI the tool was

developed using a Rich Internet Application tool (Adobe Flashbuilder) and all of

the web services have been optimised to be as efficient and as fast as possible.

Wherever possible symbology is changed on the client so that users can change

how the map looks instantaneously without having to refetch all of the data.

Sustainability

Another key consideration in the development of the CSN tool was in its

sustainability. The tool was designed so that future updates to the databases or

to the applciation could be made as easily as possible - so keeping the

information timely. All of the data is held in a fully relational ArcSDE database

which uses spatial views to make updating very simple. In addition, the system

architecture and code is fully documented and in the public domain (using

GitHub) so that any future development work is made easier.

Reporting

The reporting features of the site support not just interactive web mapping, but