Conservation Special Interest Group Presentation, Esri UC 2020

it's my pleasure today to be here to moderate this session um the conservation special interest group meeting at the esri virtual uc 2020 i'm hope that everybody's had a really great conference um there's a number of you that have come to find me and and we've had some great conversations about the work that you do in conservation and that's really the nature of this this uh special interest group um meeting is really to focus on a couple of individuals today and the really meaningful work that they are doing using web gis to capture information in the field and to share it with a number of different stakeholders and so i have with me today joining me i have liz nara from african people and wildlife it's a nonprofit based in east africa and i also have arthur rodriguez from the oregon department of fish and wildlife too and so we're going to have them go through their presentation today each of them going to take about 20 minutes and then at the end we're going to have some some q a where we go kind of backwards and forwards i'd ask just for the sake of um you know the the kind of flow of the presentation that it would be great to sort of save your questions towards the end you can put them into the chat um we're just not going to answer them throughout the presentation and so if you are putting a specific question in the chat for a specific person um you know say like put liz or put arthur or myself adam um in in your message somewhere just so that we know who you're kind of directing it to and if you don't direct it to anyone each of us might take a shot at trying to answer that question so without further ado i'll turn this over to liz take it away hi everybody uh thanks adam i hope you're all enjoying the conference so far i'm elizabeth narrow as adam said the head of the monitoring and evaluation and gis departments at african people and wildlife and again i'd like to thank esri for giving us the opportunity to share our work with you all today during this conservation shared interest group session um today i'll be talking about how we find the balance between tradition and technology to foster innovation in conservation science so african people and wildlife is based in northern tanzania with our headquarters at the nola holo environmental center on the southeastern border of tarangiri national park we were founded in 2005 by dr leily lichtenfeld to turn the wildlife conservation question around and understand environmental issues from the local point of view northern tanzania is a biodiversity hot spot with some of africa's most iconic protective areas but in tanzania these protected areas aren't fenced which allows wildlife to roam freely along natural migratory routes that cross through human dominated landscapes this means that 92 of the rangelands which you can see shaded in the brown areas here are shared between people livestock and wildlife naturally this freedom of movement increases the likelihood of human wildlife conflict reducing this conflict is a primary goal for african people and wildlife and the use of geospatial technology through the arcgis platform has furthered our work in three main program areas which i'll walk through today the first program i'll talk about is our human wildlife conflict prevention program so on the map just now you'll see the locations of our living walls that just appeared in red or fortified corrals that help to prevent lions leopard and hyena from attacking pastoralists livestock at night the next program i'll discuss is the natural resource stewardship program here you'll see appearing the pastures that we monitor and manage they're appearing on the map in green and you'll notice that their locations are in critical wildlife corridors and lastly i'll talk about our conservation enterprise program so you can see the overlay now of beehive zones on the map and how our programs are overlapped on the landscape in a visualization of our holistic approach to conservation all of these landscape shots by the way in the presentation today are depicting lands outside of the protected areas so they demonstrate what we aspire to which is healthy and connected landscapes for both people and wildlife so when apw was founded in 2005 and for the first decade of our work we collected data on human wildlife conflict incidents through paper forms that were filled out by local maasai warriors whose traditional role in a community is to protect people and livestock from predators these warriors for wildlife provided invaluable data on conflict trends and helped design the living walls program where living committer trees from the form the posts of a cattle corral that we reinforce with chain-link fencing to create an impenetral barrier from predators by 2016 we shifted to the mobile data collection app odk collect but still had to run analytics and visualizations manually or through excel and then in 2019 we were granted oops there it is then in 2019 we were granted access to the esri arcgis platform through the solutions for protected area management and this really revolutionized the way that we collect data in the field and provided a platform for automated output analysis giving us more time to conduct outcome and impact level program evaluations that require more qualitative data so now the dashboard app does most of the simple conflict analytics for us in real time since it's linked to a live survey123 form for instance this pie chart here in the center shows the percentage of conflict incidents by predator type you can see that hyena labeled in their swahili named fici are responsible for over 70 percent of the attacks on livestock and by selecting this slice of the pie chart the rest of the dashboard filters by hyena attacks and we can see in the pie chart to its right here that over 60 percent of these conflicts occur at the boma not out in the rangelands then at the bottom here we can look at the conflicts by political district and see that in babati district which is now filtered at the map so you can see those green points there is significantly more conflict at the boma so this gives us a better sense of where to prioritize building living walls to reduce conflict overall now lastly we can use the arc online kind of one-click heat map function to convert those conflict incident points into an easy easily visualized conflict hotspot map like this and again in this babati district here you can see the conflict concentration is high and we now use this feature to prioritize requests for living walls in the areas where the impact will be the greatest we now have about 1200 living walls that improve landscape connectivity with over 180 000 trees they secure the livelihoods of over 16 000 rural people in northern tanzania and they protect a population of about 500 lions from revenge killing so after having success in transitioning our human wildlife conflict program to the arcgis platform we thought that the same tools could be useful for community decision making as well so we transitioned our rangeland monitoring protocols to survey123 and by monitoring the grazing quality of pastures each month pastoral communities are better able to manage rangelands to ensure the grass resources are sustained throughout the dry season we worked with the grazing committees in each of our 20 villages to select plots for monthly monitoring which you can see on the map here the two local pastoralists from each community measure grass height vegetation cover and a few other pasture quality metrics every five meters along a 100 meter transect so that's 20 samples to help the grazing committees make informed management decisions and soon after deploying the survey123 form the village grazing committees expressed their need for more data on invasive species trends so we created a field guide of common invasive species and worked with our rangeland monitors throughout northern tanzania to include the locally relevant names of each plant so the slide you see here is one page of that field guide showing a species in the solanaceae that is frequently found in the rangelands in northern tanzania and is thought to be expanding dangerously we updated the survey123 forum to include a related table where the monitors select each invasive species present in those 20 samples along the transect but after we published the survey123 form we had some trouble displaying multiple series on one chart since the question was originally written as a multiple select we were able to create luckily an arcade expression that sorted filtered and calculated the frequency of each species and populated that frequency back into the parent data set and once the frequencies were back in the parent data it was easy enough to link that feature layer to a dashboard and create a multiple series serial chart and here is the final result showing a comparison of multiple invasive species frequencies changing over time and then when added into a dashboard sorted for each village you can see how the invasive species chart here at the top compares to the grass height here in the middle and then the pastoralists perception of grazing quality at the bottom so we wanted to make sure we included this more perception quality indicator to ensure that we're getting that indigenous perspective on the grazing quality and now that we've been working with these dashboards for a while we've begun to see the village grazing communities using these dashboards in real time to make decisions about when to rest pasture to graze other pastures or to implement invasive species removal techniques [Music] and the last program we'll talk about here is our women's beekeeping initiative in addition to the arcgis online platform we began using arc pro last year for the beekeeping program and this first map shows the locations of beehives surrounding tarangiri national park that women's groups harvest honey from and sell in their local markets since the trees can't be cut down if they support local enterprise the beehives provide some protection for shade trees in the pasture but the hives may also help restore larger portions of rangeland since honeybees will travel about five kilometers from their hive for nectar and they tend to select native species as fodder so in arc pro we generated a five kilometer buffer which you can just see here around each hive to show the area where the bees may pollinate more native species and then if we remove those initial hive points we can get an area here we have an estimated 439 000 acres of pasture that we think are being positively impacted by the presence of these bees and like i said this is something that we just think and luckily we have the opportunity through the integration of our programs to test this assumption using our existing rangeland plots that i described in the last section so the gray squares that are on the map now represent rangeland monitoring plots in several villages where we also support a beekeeping initiative and by comparing invasive species invasive species frequency trends between the plots within these beekeeping uh zones of influence and those outside of those areas we can get a better sense of if and how the bee hives are impacting the landscape and we can use these data then to strategically place beehives in degraded pastures as a restoration technique so now using arc pro we've been able to measure some of the ecological impact of the beekeeping program but as you guys i'm sure all know it's much harder to capture the social and economic outcomes for the women's groups that are involved in harvesting and selling these honey products but through the lessons that we learned from using the arcgis platform in our other programs we've expanded our understanding of geospatial data and how it can be used to support communities so currently as we're speaking right now ongoing north of tarangiri national park our women's groups are harvesting nearly 1 000 bee hives and this is the first year where they'll be using collector and survey 123 to measure this harvest and even more exciting in the next few months these women will be using dashboards workforce and survey123 to track the honey processing and perform some basic sales analyses through this women's enterprise center that was just open this year to help the women further their conservation economy and i'd like to end here with we never thought we'd be able to use these same systems in our human wildlife conflict program for maasai warriors and for our women's conservation enterprise but now we're well underway in integrating most of our programs into this holistic system these tools have proven to be powerful ways to empower communities especially women to grow their conservation enterprises with geography as a common integration framework and i'd like to end with a thought from a tanzanian colleague of mine who works closely with our women's beekeeping groups on building their capacity to use technology in their work she says imagine if thousands more african women out there decided to pursue a life in conservation how much more change could we create so thank you all i hope that you see next year we'll all be back together in person uh to show just how much change we've all created in the past year thank you liz this is really brilliant and i appreciate you going through in such great detail all of the the really amazing work that you've been doing so thank you for that i'm going to turn things over to arthur now to share his presentation i did notice that there's a couple of questions just a quick reminder i flagged these questions with specific kind of tags and we'll answer them once arthur's kind of gone through his presentation so feel free to keep commenting or asking questions in the chat and arthur take it away for us thank you adam uh can you see my screen and everything okay yes okay uh so thank you uh as adam mentioned i work for the oregon department of fish and wildlife so we're changing a little bit of our geography and and habitats and some of the species we're going to see i am the organ conservation strategy gis analyst the organ conservation strategy is oregon's state wildlife action plan that prioritizes species and habitats and issues affecting those species and habitats and one of the most important pieces of information when looking at those kinds of priorities and identifying those priorities and then working with them is knowing where the wildlife is occurring and where it has occurred in the past and so we work quite a bit with wildlife species observations and we've talked for a really long time about the need to improve how we manage them from a more centralized system a few years ago we had a project underway where we kind of really had to put as many observations as we could into a single data set and we had some funding and resources available and so began an initiative to more holistically manage our wildlife species observations really looking at all aspects of the observation data life cycle and so what i'd like to talk to you about today is uh first kind of start with talking a little bit more about wildlife species observations in general show you some examples of where we get our wildlife species data and some of the complexities involved in working with that introduce you to uh the oregon department of fish and wildlife wildlife species observation system uh which we worked on with the esri advantage program i'll talk more about that and then close with some next steps uh stuff that we're working on now which i think does a good job of illustrating what we can now kind of focus on and what we can do with this system and then finally uh some really quick kind of less big picture lessons learned from our work with all of this so essentially a wildlife observation point the way that i'm talking about them is uh the documented occurrence of a wildlife species at a given location at a point in time so those are really the three required elements that we need for a point to be useful for a lot of the work that we're doing with them and these come from a lot of different sources a lot of different projects going on throughout oregon we have historic data some of it dates back to 150 years ago we have survey data so this is data that's coming from surveys focused on a particular species or a particular area we have trail cameras uh set up across the state for a lot of different projects a lot of them are set up more just to capture still images so when a species crosses in front of them i would take that picture and document its presence some of them are set up to capture video some of them are baited or have some type of incentive for a species to come a little bit closer others are just set up in areas for us to see what's passing by or to look for a particular species and then of course it's always i think a good excuse to watch puppies play during a presentation anytime you can do that i think it's worth doing so it comes in handy another really cool project where we're getting observation data from is um one being led by researchers from the oregon state university cascades in the northwestern bat hub where they're working with odfw uh field staff and some of our agency staff to set up acoustic monitoring devices across the state so these record bat echolocation calls and then those calls can be converted into signals and those signals get then can be used to identify specific species and this kind of data is being used by researchers to look at changes in populations and ranges especially as bats are impacted by climate change energy development such as wind turbines and white nose syndrome which is a disease that's just starting to show up in oregon and its surrounding states and i set this up so hopefully we can hear you do have to maybe listen a little bit hard but there should be a clicking sound and that is a echolocation call of the spotted bat which is one of our more rare bat species to organ conservation strategy species we utilize remote sensing uh within our agency a lot of this is done by field staff that work with our large ungulates our game species like deer and elk where they survey out of helicopters this is an example of using remo infrared sensors excuse me to monitor sage grouse which is an upland game bird species in eastern oregon really high priority species for us and so you can use this kind of technology it's less invasive and also it's really good for accessing really remote areas that are hard to get to a really emerging technology that we're kind of just starting to take a look at is environmental dna or e-dna so here staff are taking water samples and then analyzing them for the presence of dna of the foothill yellow-legged frog so you have to really you have to know what species you're looking for and there's a lot involved with you know knowing what their dna looks like but i think it's going to be a really good way to collect data on our aquatic wildlife in the in the state we have quite a bit of data we get from partners of course i wanted to particularly call out oregon biodiversity information center that's our state natural heritage program and they maintain a very important database on rare threat and endangered species it's one of our most important data sets we work with universities uh other state agencies uh federal agencies nonprofits really anybody that is collecting wildlife data even something like road crossing or roadkill data helps us see where animals are moving across the landscape that we get from the department of transportation we're really just starting to scratch the surface i think of using community science we are working with the ebird and naturalist programs and these are international programs they're set up to uh have community members of the community upload observations they handle all the verification and management of that data and then we can just download them and ingest them into our data sets so not only is it a really great source of data but it's a really great way for us to connect with the community and kind of tell that story about community involvement and wildlife management so we've seen a lot of different sources here i mean and that's really just um a small example of the different ways that we get data and we you quickly run into limitations when you start working with it in an uncentralized environment for starters there's no standardization and even something as simple as species names gets very complicated very quickly the same species can be called different things in different sources some sources might use a scientific name some might use a common name spelling capitalization all of that makes it difficult to query for a particular species also date formats which i'm sure everyone is familiar with are frustrating when they're in different formats you can't do queries or searches or filters for a period of time another issue with decentralized data is data is frequently left out so when someone asks for especially with a quick turnaround it's really easy to leave out a particular data set if everything is not all together it's also difficult to incorporate new data so when a new survey comes in we have to create a brand new data structure and there's really no place to include incidental observations which are observations made by our staff out in the field while they're working on um maybe they're working on a particular species like a deer survey or a habitat assessment and then they come into contact with a high priority species there was really no place to put that information until now and so when we started talking about what what we wanted this system to do what we were looking for some pretty clear requirements quickly rose to the surface we knew uh we needed to maintain uh our data in a secure environment we're dealing with locations of threatened and endangered listed species also species that have market value uh both in the game and hunting side and also the pet trade things like amphibians and reptiles so we knew our services and our data and our map applications were going to have to be maintained in the odfw network we also knew we needed to incorporate many types of data uh we saw some of those examples earlier so it needed to be very flexible to allow for different data sets to uh fit together we wanted something that was fully integrated into our agency operations we have about 250 gis users in the oregon department of fish and wildlife everyone is using esri products arcgis desktop primarily also field collection apps arcgis pro um so we wanted something that really just kind of fit into that workflow and didn't present a steep learning curve or additional work that was going to be needed by staff something that was really as easy to use as possible both in the data providing side and also the data use side and then finally we wanted something that would really promote participation by our staff so we have a lot of staff in our field staff in our agency with data that's in a hard copy format perhaps in file cabinets in their offices um data that they're collecting that we really need them to we really need to work with them in order to get that data into these systems so we wanted something that would be easy to use but then also they would see the benefits and both how they use the data and also even the data collection process trying to improve or make you know any of their day-to-day operations more efficient so when we started talking about developing this system uh we sort of took the more traditional approach of let's write a request for proposals we'll work with a contractor you know we'll develop this um you know sort of that old-fashioned way and then i was talking with dave smetana who is an esri advisor and um works a lot in the field of conservation gis he works a lot with the state of oregon agencies also and i was kind of just explaining this project to him and he mentioned the esri advantage program and so that is a program that we are using through our state gis license our license is managed by a state our state department of administrative services that manages all the licenses for the state of oregon so we could purchase credits and then have customized support for a particular project and so that could include anything from training uh to for us to learn how to utilize some of the software project planning and then what we used a lot of the credits were for was uh technical support from esri consultants and so dave and i talked quite a bit and came up with an initial work plan rather than go through those steps i think i'll just show you the results of each of them and introduce you to the odfw wildlife species observation system so the first thing we worked on was upgrading our gis environment so that we could handle this kind of work we had an esri consultant come to our office and spend about a week with john bowers who is our gis coordinator and they upgraded our arcgis servers we have both an internal and an external environment also installed portal and set that up and that allowed us then to develop services and applications that were in that secure environment but also easy for folks within our agency to access we then worked on geodatabase design and so this is where we started looking at a lot of those standardization issues and um trying to put everything together in a more cohesive holistic system so this slide gets pretty complicated i'm not going to go through all of it but i did want to highlight the shapes on the left side of your screen in green that's our odfw internal observation database and so that's connected to tables that provide information on evidence um like like pictures or audio recordings also projects so that you can search by particular projects or even add a project that might have hard copy data that we could look at uh prioritizing for digitizing at some point it's also connected to a field data entry an office data entry i'll talk more about those in in a moment but this is what we really built to kind of handle all that data that didn't really have a permanent home before and that's also where we're now putting those incidental observations i talked about earlier so that connects with other odfw data our partner data and everything feeds into this consolidated wildlife species observation database everything is tied to a standardized species list so all species are given a standardized name and then that's all pushed out into public tools after they're summarized to an appropriate scale and internal tools as well where folks can work with the actual data uh one thing i did want to highlight as part of the geodatabase design one of the consultants really helped with this where i had written a series of essentially like data dictionaries for uh field lists of what i wanted in my uh database and um so that was sort of the main observation table and then it was related to these different you know evidence tables or species tables and the consultant wrote a script that would take those excel worksheets and then automatically create a blank file geodatabase with the tables the feature class the relationship classes all populated within there so i could then work within that environment see what was working see what wasn't working go back to the excel spreadsheets fix it and then rerun the script to produce a new one and then finally when i got it to a point where it was meeting all of our needs we uploaded that file geodatabase into our enterprise geodatabase we worked quite a bit on the data input workflow side this was really a successful part of the project in developing an odfw wildlife observation survey so we're now using survey123 to collect not only the incidental observations but some staff are also starting to use this for surveys of specific species or a specific area this was really a new concept for our agency we have a lot of staff using esri field data collection apps especially collector but this one was really one of the first ones it might still be one of the only ones that's intended really for all staff to use at any time it's there and it's available um rather than sort of a specific project you know developing a survey or or a collector app for a specific project we also worked quite a bit on automating data compilation as much as we could so producing that consolidated wildlife database um i'm currently using model builder to kind of run through each source and put it into a standardized format and upload it into that master database we looked quite a bit at the data interoperability wizard i think that could be a good way to go in the future i also heard about arcgis pro tasks earlier in this conference the other day that i think could be a good thing to look at so i think there's a lot of improvements we can make here but just having all of this documented and i can go back and kind of see all of the different steps in model builder rerun things when i need to has already been a big benefit uh i wanted to quickly point out something related to the wildlife observation survey and kind of going back to that promoting participation side this is an example of a report that i generated um or put together about a year after the the survey was really live i was first launched in 2017 and we did some testing for a while and then really launched for the summer season of 2018 and so this highlights the top contributors to the survey the different species that are being added to it it shows the points across the state tries to provide some instructions on how to get the survey working and how to access the collected data and then tries to be specific about what we're looking for so rather than just saying here's a survey collect a lot of species we wanted to be provide some direction and kind of highlight some particular species that we're interested in in different parts of the state so this was just really one of the ways that we uh looked to kind of interact more with our field staff and kind of show them how the survey is working and garner more participation and it's working pretty well we had about 200 observations for 2019 i think we're up to over 500 now for 2020 so we're getting more each year which is nice to see on the data output side we had an esri consultant come and meet with us in the odfw offices to look at requirements gathering and spend about a week with us and have meetings with different field staff and headquarters staff and talk about how they're using the data identify common questions not only did that help in the viewing application but it also helped with that geodatabase design knowing what domains to create what to make searchable um those those kinds of questions we took the information that came out of those meetings and developed a viewer using arcgis web app builder we tried to keep as much of we could um of the functionality using just the default widgets and and the default tools this was built within our portal environment um but we did run into one issue where we needed a particular functionality that wasn't available and so we worked with the esri consultants as part of the enterprise or advantage program excuse me uh to develop a custom widget so that was just another example of kind of going to them when we needed something and and then producing that as as part of the project so this viewer just allows staff to zoom into a particular area get information about the actual raw or the actual points when they were collected where they come from do some basic reporting on what is in a given area or information about a particular species so um that application we were just looking at that screenshot is really still in more of a draft format um so one of the first things we're going to be working on when we talk about next steps is finalizing that releasing it to the agency i think that's going to be another good way of showing staff what they're going to get out of this system hopefully help with that participation side we've also talked a little bit about additional apps and one of the things that's been interesting about finalizing that is now that we have our consolidated wildlife database it's up to about two and a half million records which is a lot more than we used to have so now we have new problems of dealing with these large data sets and map services so it's a good problem to have but um it creates a new thing for us to look at we'll be taking that data and updating our various statewide analyses so these are those public tools i talked about earlier things like identifying species that are observed in our conservation opportunity areas so that's going to be something we work on very soon and it's going to be a lot more streamlined now that we have this consistent data structure we can start looking at data gaps a lot more now that we have all the data together an example of that is the porcupine so this is a species that was pretty common across oregon and anecdotally it's starting to be observed less and less often but we don't really know what's happening to the to the date to the species because we don't really have a lot of data probably because it was so common folks it wasn't really usual to record a sighting of them so now that we have this data set when we get a request for this kind of species from a researcher or people start talking about it like that we can take a look at everything altogether see that we don't have many points and then start doing either data gathering from outside sources or focused data collecting within our agency additional data gathering uh is something we're looking at right now is working with our staff to look at their trail camera photos a lot of photos or cameras are set up for specific species and record a lot of incidental species so we'd like to go through those photos and um pull out those observations here in the near future and um i just really like this trail camera photo of a bear scratching its back on a tree uh we want to take a look more at including movement data in this kind of these kinds of tools so all the data i've been talking about so far is really focused on presence really unique observations um so as much as we can we'd also like to incorporate we have a lot of species we collect data on using telemetry or gps collars and so uh that's really just another piece of the puzzle that we'd like to have accessible in a lot of these tools i mentioned earlier that i think we're really just scratching the surface of working with community science we are using their data and again it's a huge data source and has been a really great way to get a lot more points especially on birds for within ebird but i think we could do a lot more interaction with the community and these programs um you know focused bio blitzes for a particular area or a particular species um other states and other uh programs i know have done that kind of work and i think that would be a great way for us to interact with the community and get more data and then i wanted to talk really quickly about a project that's currently underway within odf w the organ connectivity assessment and mapping project where we are modeling habitat and movement pathways for 54 species across their ranges in the state of oregon we're using observation data in a really neat way in this project to validate those models and so we're working with researchers at portland state university and the samara group and they are going to be trying to get as much information as they can out of these observation data points that come from a lot of different sources with very limited requirements so it's been an interesting discussion talking with these statistics and mathematics professors about well you know this data comes from all these different sources and you know you make you can't really make those kinds of inferences and so we've been trying to identify what kind of biases we can statistically point out and try and get as much information out of each point as possible within ocamp once those species are modeled we're pulling out corridors and then looking at where all the different species corridors might connect to identify priority areas for conservation or restoration or preservation so very quickly i wanted to touch a little bit on some of the big picture lessons i think we learned from this project it was kind of a different project it is kind of a different project from what development wise that i'm used to because it really wasn't sort of developing a contract having this really clear end goal and then meeting that deadline instead it's more um you know working on improving our overall process in a lot of ways so the first thing i wanted to call out is the esri advantage program that has been a huge uh support for this project it was a great fit they were able to kind of work through all the challenges that came up our gis coordinator pointed out to me when they were doing the um upgrades that they just made it a lot more efficient so as you're working within your unique system they really helped to kind of overcome those challenges i think we're seeing a lot of agency-wide enhancements from this project as well so it's not just about you know this specific program or this specific data set but upgrading our servers installing portal um even you know standardizing data i think is showing um is really helping a lot of programs within our agency something i've gotten a little frustrated with because it's not sort of that uh traditional project is is not having everything completed yet we started this about three years ago and without having those real firm deadlines i think it's easy for things to move back but when i was putting this presentation together i was really amazed by all the progress we've made so kind of keeping that slow and steady um view of what we're doing in mind has worked really well and then lastly i just wanted to call out again that promoting participation side that's been a huge success for us working with our staff see what's working change what isn't we're not trying to force anyone to do anything necessarily it's more improving their workflows as much as it is uh improving our centralized data uh finally um i wanted to point to a couple of the different programs and projects we're working on within odfw those community science projects as well if you can access uh the story map then you can see these links you can also just sort of google search uh any of these i think and they should come up right away finally a very quick thank you to andrea and john within odfw um who worked who i worked with quite closely on this project uh dave smatana who i mentioned earlier uh was the advisor for this project and and really helped quite a bit and then of course or helped a lot sorry dave and then of course scott uh tavis travis mike gavin and jerry all the consultants and the solution engineer that worked with us for all of their help as well thank you thank you so much artie this was really great um and it was kind of excellent to go through we do have some some questions so i'm gonna sort of go through them in order of kind of how they were asked um i've tried to sort of flag each of them for you know each of the different presenters whether it was liz or um already and so i will kind of read the question and then sort of hand it over to one of you um you know and then i can add some flavor to it if needed as well so the first question here is by e simmonson and this was for liz and this was the question was how easy was it to get local communities working with apps like survey123 and the esri suite in general thanks that's a great question um if you remember from the presentation we started in 2005 with paper forms um so in terms of getting the local communities to kind of buy into the process of collecting data and recording it that had been a long term effort then again in 2016 we started using a mobile app that's quite simple called odk collect which was kind of a nice transition into using a cell phone using a mobile phone for data collection by the time we transitioned to survey123 many of our existing warriors for wildlife and rangeland monitors had some experience with data collection and mobile data collection in general um i do think there are still the normal challenges we run into with network or with phone problems or with the monitors you know taking up too much data downloading facebook and whatsapp and everything else um so we still have a lot of technical support to the field extension teams um but i've noticed that in general a lot of the the people and the communities we work with are excited to use the technology and then see it how see it used then again in those dashboards um so i think the inclusion of dashboards where the communities can really access the data visualized on the back end or at the end i guess is really helpful in getting the communities to buy into the process of using mobile data collection thanks liz it's really great you know it's a any change in and something that is new takes time and i think it was encouraging to talk with you ahead of this presentation just about that um you know being able to collect something that felt physical like here we're actually collecting something out in the field but then actually to see the results of it and start to have that sort of dialogue i think there's a there's a lot of power of meeting people where they are um not just sort of putting digital things in front of them right of like i think that sort of collaboration is really key to help help people get over that sort of um you know maybe being uncomfortable with uh you know with doing something new so thanks for that answer uh they have another question as well from e simonson uh are all of your dashboards linked to survey123 and this was also for you liz uh yes i'm thinking we have as an organization about 30 dashboards now each one of our survey123 forms for each program has a dashboard attached to it or linked to it and then we do have a few dashboards for finances or for impact that are kind of attached to static data sets that aren't live sexless ones you saw today were all live though yes great uh and then i have another question question for you liz also this is from uh animash uh the the question is can you please briefly share the data collection method from the field what types of trouble you potentially face to collect such data at the beginning okay i will assume that's referring to the rangeland program for protocol so when we have the monitors in the field they usually are carrying with them a phone a gps unit um a 100 meter tape measure for a transect and a quadrat and their species invasive species field guide um so when they get out to each plot again they're using their collector to find their plots though after a few months most of the monitors will know exactly where those plots are a lot of our monitors are pastoralists so they know the land in and out and don't even need a gps to find that same tree every month from there they drop the 100 meter transect facing north drop a quadrat every five meters along with a one one meter meter stick and there they measure grass height at the center point uh invasive species frequency within the quadrat and percentage bare ground versus basal vegetation so these protocols were originally developed by u.s forest service and then we used kind of a combination of the u.s forest service protocol through land pks um with some of david western's rangeland monitoring protocols from southern kenya that are just a little bit more tailored to the arid landscapes and to working with communities measuring rangeland in general great thank you i also had another question here also for you liz this was sort of in um some time order so there's a bunch of questions already coming up um vero asked this is amazing work at african people people in my life i would like to know what the biggest barrier is that you face when deploying these gis tools within the community community and how you overcame that i think you've talked about that a little bit but if you could maybe speak to um some of the people that weren't familiar with the outcomes of doing the collection right and and how some of those conversations between uh african people and wildlife and sort of the community leaders that are involved in sort of decision making i don't know if you could speak to that to kind of help answer this question sure thank you so i think to me the largest barrier was probably using technology not just for data collection in terms of you know clicking which species somebody is seeing or basic observations but using the using the mapping tools um when we were using paper forms or odk collect we would ask um the monitors or the extension officers to like write out the coordinates in decimal degrees from whatever handheld gps unit they were using when we transitioned to survey123 we have a geopoint question and we've noticed that a lot of a lot of people if they're not used to that concept of of mapping or looking at landscape from the bird's eye view we've had a lot of people kind of move the map around with their finger uh or turn their gps off and i end up with the points in portugal um or in that you know the the null island out off the coast of gabon um so we've had quite a few issues with that uh but have been working closely with a lot of the extension officers to to train them not just on how to do it but why and what the coordinates mean and what happens if you put a negative number in front of the latitude or in front of the longitude and and it's i think been been quite helpful for the a lot of our extension officers to learn that um in terms of in terms of on a personal level getting the officers used to working closely with an organization but also maintaining their maintaining their partiality as a member of the community particularly with the human wildlife conflict program um we want these people to be members of the community and collecting the data that they would have been collecting without a phone just as as a warrior uh within their community so that's been something that we've been working closely with them on to maintain their their credibility as a member of the community while also collecting data that we can use um though of course that data really does belong to the communities at the end of the day thanks liz um i'm going to take one more for you with this like a number of different questions and then i'm going to move on to a couple from uh artists for artie as well and so this question is by uh gaia bonini and the the question is can you speak a bit more to the training provided to monitoring teams in the rangelands as well as the women's beekeeping initiative on using these technologies and platforms like successes or failures and also says thank you brilliant chat thank you uh yeah sure um i had learned this this technique of training people on mapping projections and and gis in general back when i was an undergrad of using an orange um and luckily oranges are plentiful at you know at nola hollow environmental center so during our last training with the rangeland monitors we gave everybody an orange explained that the orange was representing the earth and had them peel the orange in whatever way they wanted to and then asked them to lay that peel out flat on the table and this was a fun technique i think for them to understand that they can take this full landscape and flatten it out but noticing that it's going to be you know distorted as you guys all know um we were trying to explain the concept of projections and how you can actually look at the earth from above just like they're looking at their orange peel so that was one of the main training methods that we used just to get people to understand what they're looking at on their phone when they see a topographic map we've also for some different programs found that it's more understandable for some of our officers to use satellite imagery as a base map instead of topographic which just requires a little less explanation um and again a lot of the officers already understand the vegetation cover and the soil type so well in their landscape that they can literally see in the sat imagery um they can see the soil type change and they say oh you know i know that this is the river or i know that this is that black cotton soil so i would say one of the successes that we've had is is definitely explaining projections and geospatial data uh from a from a true gis perspective instead of just telling people to click that little button in the corner that will zoom in on your area um i think again challenges have been i'll say this because you mentioned the beekeeping program getting more women involved um the beekeeping program has been is a very new introduction to our use of the esri arcgis platform um and we're just starting to get the women using phones and for data collection and not just being part of the harvest on a technical beekeeping beekeeping um point of view uh traditionally women are not usually trained rangeland monitors or warriors um so this is something that we still definitely struggle with is just incorporating more women into all of the programs and ensuring that they are just as confident using these geospatial tools as the men in their communities thank you liz uh artie question for you so um this comes from rachel simpson and says hi already this is awesome looks like you integrate data that is from o-r-b-i-c can you touch on the workflow for addressing taxonomic reconciliation especially when orbic revises taxonomy it's a very specific question but wondered if it is and um i believe so the orbic data is is an interesting data set to work with um and i can touch on a couple things about it i hope that it gets to what uh rachel is asking um so one of the uh issues we have with them is we're actually providing data to them as well so there's that sort of circular thing that ends up where we need to make sure we're not duplicating data and we're getting data from partners because they're working in a consolidated uh database as well um and i i may one of the things she might be talking about when she talks about taxonomic reconciliation they don't really work at the subspecies level too much so a lot of their stuff is more at the species level um so that is an issue for us with some species where we are where the subspecies might be of a higher priority maybe some type of a more important status like listed or strategy species we can't you can't really pull that out of a um a data set that's combining it with other subspecies um so example of that is the um sandhill crane uh the greater sandhill crane is a higher priority a higher status than the lesser and so when somebody gives us a data set um that just says sandhill crane we can't we can't really decide what that is whereas the other direction it's a little bit easier if you're combining subspecies so it does present one of those challenges um that's one of the reasons we're looking more towards working with data providers as much as we can orbic plays a very important role but trying to get the source data i think is going to help us address some of those uh challenges as well i i hope that answers the question thanks artie uh so there's also a couple of other questions um here one that was for both liz and artie and says in oregon and africa are you using drones or planning to use uavs to capture wildlife and or suitable locations for hives cameras etc liz you want to go first um this has been an ongoing discussion with us at african people and wildlife to use drones in most of tanzania and particularly within the protected areas it's illegal or requires pretty significant permitting so at this point while we have kind of dabbled in looking for funding for drones and i think would be very interested in that uh it is a barrier to to get through the permitting process yeah it's it's interesting to think of the similarities and the differences uh with with work you know in the states and within oregon um i see us moving towards drones probably at some point um i talked a little bit about remote sensing in our staff going up in helicopters um you know drones provide some advantages to that especially from a safety perspective um but obviously there's also some drawbacks and and there's going to be a learning curve and getting the technology to where it can be where the the drones can go you know as far as maybe a helicopter can or cover as much ground so um i i could see it happening at some point there is some issues also with the permitting um i know it's sort of an emerging technology um so trying to figure out how you know the faa rules and and the um challenges with some of that i know has also been an issue they've been used uh to do some habitat monitoring um for some of our smaller property easement for example um so i think there's there's definitely going to be some um applications from them it's just going to take some time i think to see how it all fits together great excellent and unfortunately we we have more questions but unfortunately we are out of time um you know and so i i just wanted to say thank you both to liz and artie for your wonderful presentations and everybody for your fabulous questions too like i think this is is a a great opportunity just to mention that the networking portion of the esri user conference um is still live so if um you feel like you maybe didn't get your questions answered there um you know it's still possible to kind of you can come reach out to me and i can potentially connect you with people if you need to as well i think i've you know kind of connected with a number of you um that potentially are watching this presentation so thank you very much uh enjoy the rest of the the conference um and thanks again artie and liz you

Channel: Esri Events

Views: 410

Keywords: Esri, ArcGIS, GIS, Esri Events, Geographic Information System, Conservation, User Conference

Id: jFRRpVP7GIw

Length: 61min 23sec (3683 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 11 2020