Carbonscapes A National Look at Soil Carbon Landscapes H. Franklin LaFone and Maneesh Sharma

About the Project The goal of USDA CarbonScapes is to provide a useful and easy to navigate web map application to educate and answer questions for stakeholders about USDA inventory, modeling, and mapping of terrestrial biosphere carbon across the landscape. Partners USDA NRCS West Virginia University WV GIS Technical Center http://www.carbonscapes.org/

History Attempt to get all the data onto a common ‘table’ Developed by the contractor Critigen Created by interaction with USDA stakeholders The first attempt to make a unified tool Technology basis Flex based Chosen for quick development and cross browser compatibility Rests on SQL Server platform/CMS which contains all data

Limitations All things to all people - No clear focus on audience or how it would be used Development ended in Beta – no real user testing implemented Complex, unintuitive interface Little user documentation Incredibly difficult to update/add data

How to Address the Issues? Team with the experts Conducted a series of meetings with NRCS staff Created small focus groups - Users of varying expertise level Technology Changes Interface in more modern technologies – HTML 5/JavaScript Less ‘enterprise’ level back end work Create appropriate products for appropriate audiences ‘All things to all people’ is ambitious Different audiences are looking for different answers – one size does not fit all

Entry Point

Atlas

Atlas

Atlas

Explorer

Explorer

Explorer

Explorer

Explorer

Data

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Future Directions Add new data pools Critically evaluate each section – does it serve a purpose? Make the infrastructure easier to update – CMS Mobile development

Questions? Comments?