Conservation Geoportal

Last updated January 08, 2023

The Conservation Geoportal was an online geoportal, intended to provide a comprehensive listing of geographic information systems (GIS) datasets and web map service relevant to biodiversity conservation. It is currently defunct.^{[ citation needed ]} The site, its contents and functionality were free for anyone to use and contribute to. The Conservation Geoportal was launched on June 28, 2006 at the joint Society for Conservation Biology and Society for Conservation GIS Conference in San Jose, California, USA. As of October 2007, it included metadata for over 3,667 GIS records.^[1]

History

The Conservation Geoportal was conceived when representatives from a group of conservation-minded organizations met at the National Geographic Society in March 2005 to define a vision for a World Conservation Base Map. Initially the focus on developing an inventory or catalog of datasets and maps in the form of a metadata database was to be mined to develop the Conservation Base Map and Atlas.

Overview

The Conservation Geoportal constitutes a collaborative effort by and for the conservation community to facilitate the discovery and publishing of GIS data and maps, to support conservation decision-making and education. It does not actually store maps and data, but rather the descriptions and links to those data resources. These descriptions are known as metadata. It was intended to provide an efficient point of access for people interested in a full range of conservation-related GIS data. Capabilities of the Conservation Geoportal included:

Search for data and maps by keyword, category, geography, or time period
Save search queries for future use
Use the built-in Map Viewer to display, manipulate, and combine live map services
Map viewer supports OpenGIS standards (WMS, WFS, WCS) and ArcIMS services
Create, save, and email custom maps using data from various web map service
Publish metadata for maps and data so others can find them
Featured Map section
Content in designated thematic data channels
Share information with other geoportal

Status

Sponsored by The Nature Conservancy, National Geographic Society and UNEP-World Conservation Monitoring Centre
~2,000 visitors per month at its peak
~3,667 metadata records & 515 registered users

Data channels

The Conservation Geoportal included Data Channels and Sub-channels to organize and facilitate access to metadata describing data and maps in a given topic or theme. Channels provided quick access (2 clicks to content) to key data resources that experts consider important to the larger user community. Channels were managed by organizations and experts (channel stewards) knowledgeable about that theme, including:

Conservation areas: Conservation areas can include existing legally protected areas, as well as areas of ecological or cultural significance identified through assessment and planning efforts. They represent areas where conservation activities are currently taking place or where one or more organizations intend to take action
Species: Species distributions including amphibian, birds, fish, mammals and many others
Habitats: Habitats and ecosystems
Threats: Threats to biodiversity
Environmental factors: Physical environmental factors including soils, geology, land cover/land use and oceanography
Socioeconomics: Factors including population, economy, policy, culture, indigenous rights, ecosystem services
Base map layers: Layers including roads, political boundaries, and satellite imagery

Geoportal consortium

The Conservation Geoportal was designed and maintained collaboratively by a consortium of institutions including (in alphabetical order):

American Museum of Natural History
Conservation International
Environmental Systems Research Institute
IUCN - The World Conservation Union
NASA
National Geographic Society
NatureServe
Smithsonian Institution
The Nature Conservancy
UNEP - World Conservation Monitoring Centre
University of Maryland - Global Land Cover Facility
USGS - National Biological Information Infrastructure
Waterborne Environmental, Inc.
Wildlife Conservation Society
World Resources Institute
World Wildlife Fund

Technology

The Conservation Geoportal was based on ESRI's GIS Portal Toolkit (Version 3.0) and ArcWeb Services technologies. Currently the site is maintained and hosted by ESRI. Although the underlying technology was proprietary, the Conservation Geoportal supports several metadata standards and OpenGIS standards, as:

FGDC and ISO 19115 metadata standards
Harvesting from ArcIMS, Z39.50, OAI, and WAF based metadata repositories
OpenGIS WFS, WMS, and WCS services through the map viewer
ArcIMS Image and ArcGIS Image Server
OpenLS geocoder

Mashup capabilities

The Map Viewer let users overlay or mashup data layers from different map servers, which may be hosted by different organizations using different protocols (e.g., ArcIMS, WMS). For example, by searching the catalog, users could discover three different map services, hosted by the Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, and World Wildlife Fund, delineating conservation priority areas. Then, with a click, these live maps can be overlaid together in the Map Viewer along with a satellite image backdrop from NASA. Users could then zoom and pan to their area of interest, turn layers on and off, adjust transparencies, and save that map view to a URL, which they can e-mail to their colleagues to show how various priority maps compare. When their colleagues click the link, exactly the same map view opens, allowing them to work with the live map, perhaps adding map services or posting the link to the map view on their Web site.

Parent project

The Conservation Geoportal was intended to support the principles and objectives of the Conservation Commons. At its simplest, it encourages organizations and individuals alike to ensure open access to data, information, expertise and knowledge related to the conservation of biodiversity. The Conservation Commons is the expression of a cooperative effort of non-governmental organizations, international and multi-lateral organizations, governments, academia, and the private sector, to improve open access to and unrestricted use of, data, information and knowledge related to the conservation of biodiversity with the belief that this will contribute to improving conservation outcomes.

Related Research Articles

Esri is an American multinational geographic information system (GIS) software company. It is best known for its ArcGIS products. With a 43% market share, Esri is the world's leading supplier of GIS software, web GIS and geodatabase management applications. The company is headquartered in Redlands, California.

In computing, the Open Geospatial Consortium Web Feature Service (WFS) Interface Standard provides an interface allowing requests for geographical features across the web using platform-independent calls. One can think of geographical features as the "source code" behind a map, whereas the WMS interface or online tiled mapping portals like Google Maps return only an image, which end-users cannot edit or spatially analyze. The XML-based GML furnishes the default payload-encoding for transporting geographic features, but other formats like shapefiles can also serve for transport. In early 2006 the OGC members approved the OpenGIS GML Simple Features Profile. This profile is designed both to increase interoperability between WFS servers and to improve the ease of implementation of the WFS standard.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ArcIMS</span>

ArcIMS is a Web Map Server produced by Esri accessible through a web browser. It is a GIS that is designed to serve maps across the Internet. Sometimes these maps are just static images allowing simple panning and zooming, while others are more complex pages. Examples of interactive maps served with ArcIMS include maps with layers that can be turned on and off, or with features containing attributes that can be queried.

In computing, GeoServer is an open-source server written in Java that allows users to share, process and edit geospatial data. Designed for interoperability, it publishes data from any major spatial data source using open standards. GeoServer has evolved to become an easy method of connecting existing information to virtual globes such as Google Earth and NASA World Wind as well as to web-based maps such as OpenLayers, Leaflet, Google Maps and Bing Maps. GeoServer functions as the reference implementation of the Open Geospatial Consortium Web Feature Service standard, and also implements the Web Map Service, Web Coverage Service and Web Processing Service specifications.

A GIS software program is a computer program to support the use of a geographic information system, providing the ability to create, store, manage, query, analyze, and visualize geographic data, that is, data representing phenomena for which location is important. The GIS software industry encompasses a broad range of commercial and open-source products that provide some or all of these capabilities within various information technology architectures.

Manifold System is a geographic information system (GIS) software package developed by Manifold Software Limited that runs on Microsoft Windows. Manifold System handles both vector and raster data, includes spatial SQL, a built-in Internet Map Server (IMS), and other general GIS features.

A Web Map Service (WMS) is a standard protocol developed by the Open Geospatial Consortium in 1999 for serving georeferenced map images over the Internet. These images are typically produced by a map server from data provided by a GIS database.

ArcGIS is a family of client, server and online geographic information system (GIS) software developed and maintained by Esri. ArcGIS was first released in 1999 and originally was released as ARC/INFO, a command line based GIS system for manipulating data. ARC/INFO was later merged into ArcGIS Desktop, which was eventually superseded by ArcGIS Pro in 2015. ArcGIS Pro works in 2D and 3D for cartography and visualization, and includes artificial Intelligence (AI).

gvSIG, geographic information system (GIS), is a desktop application designed for capturing, storing, handling, analyzing and deploying any kind of referenced geographic information in order to solve complex management and planning problems. gvSIG is known for having a user-friendly interface, being able to access the most common formats, both vector and raster ones. It features a wide range of tools for working with geographic-like information.

A geospatial content management system (GeoCMS) is a content management system where objects can have a latitude, longitude position to be displayed on an online interactive map. In addition the online maps link to informational pages on the data represented. Some GeoCMS do also allow users to edit spatial data as part of content objects. Spatial data can be published by GeoCMS as part of their contents or using standardized interfaces such as WMS or WFS.

Catalogue Service for the Web (CSW), sometimes seen as Catalogue Service - Web, is a standard for exposing a catalogue of geospatial records in XML on the Internet. The catalogue is made up of records that describe geospatial data, geospatial services, and related resources.

Mapbender is a graduated project of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. It was awarded OGC web site of the month in 2008. It is used by PortalU and several federal states to implement the INSPIRE regulation. Many municipalities use Mapbender as City Map Services and it is used as the mapping framework for online cycle route planners.

ArcGIS Server is the core server geographic information system (GIS) software made by Esri. ArcGIS Server is used for creating and managing GIS Web services, applications, and data. ArcGIS Server is typically deployed on-premises within the organization’s service-oriented architecture (SOA) or off-premises in a cloud computing environment.

Geospatial metadata is a type of metadata applicable to geographic data and information. Such objects may be stored in a geographic information system (GIS) or may simply be documents, data-sets, images or other objects, services, or related items that exist in some other native environment but whose features may be appropriate to describe in a (geographic) metadata catalog.

A Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI), also called geospatial data infrastructure, is a data infrastructure implementing a framework of geographic data, metadata, users and tools that are interactively connected in order to use spatial data in an efficient and flexible way. Another definition is "the technology, policies, standards, human resources, and related activities necessary to acquire, process, distribute, use, maintain, and preserve spatial data".

A geoportal is a type of web portal used to find and access geographic information and associated geographic services via the Internet. Geoportals are important for effective use of geographic information systems (GIS) and a key element of a spatial data infrastructure (SDI).

The Open Geospatial Consortium Web Coverage Service Interface Standard (WCS) defines Web-based retrieval of coverages – that is, digital geospatial information representing space/time-varying phenomena.

The Barrow Area Information Database (BAID) is designed to support Arctic science with a special focus on the research hubs of Barrow, Atqasuk and Ivotuk on the North Slope of Alaska.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), an international voluntary consensus standards organization for geospatial content and location-based services, sensor web and Internet of Things, GIS data processing and data sharing. It originated in 1994 and involves more than 500 commercial, governmental, nonprofit and research organizations in a consensus process encouraging development and implementation of open standards.

GeoSUR is a regional initiative led by spatial data producers in Latin America and the Caribbean to implement a regional geospatial network and to help establish the basis of a spatial data infrastructure in the region. GeoSUR supports the development of free access geographic services useful to find, view and analyze spatial information through maps, satellite images, and geographic data.

References

↑ Conservonline. "GeoPortal Status - October 2007". Conservonline. Archived from the original on November 8, 2007. Retrieved December 10, 2007.

Sources

Biasi, F. 2007. New Conservation GeoPortal Taps into a World of Maps and Data, ArcWatch (May)
ArcNews Online Conservation GeoPortal to Support Worldwide Data Sharing and Discovery. (Summer 2006)
ConserveOnline (2006) Short Concept Paper on Conservation Basemap, Atlas, & GeoPortal. (.doc format)

External links

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[status-1] Conservonline. "GeoPortal Status - October 2007". Conservonline. Archived from the original on November 8, 2007. Retrieved December 10, 2007.

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