Wow! That's quite a situation. Do you find that having a separate layer for each species is preferable to putting them together, then maybe defining layer views?
But that's the data side, not the maps/apps...
Could the editable layer users sketch on simply be one single feature layer with a dropdown/text box for "species"? 80 is a lot of choices, but that might be one way to simplify things.
Here's another idea. Create a "master" web app that serves as the template for all the others. In AGO Assisstant, you can see the JSON of the web app:
In fact, as you've made that sample public, I can view it as well:
The JSON will depend a lot on the contents and configuration of the app itself, but you'll be able to spot the layer IDs and the service URLs. All you'd need to do is to copy everything else from the "master" app into the various species specific apps, but keep each pointing at their own layers.
It would still be a bit of manual work, but altering the JSON can be done programmatically as well via Python and the ArcGIS API.
You might even consider using something like GitHub to track the various JSON files and work with them as external files, then use Python to read the JSON into the update_definition function on an app.
Edit: another thought! This might be a data management nightmare, but suppose the relevant layer groups (ranges, models, ALA) were each a big layer with species as a field. You could use the Group Filter widget to simultaneously filter each layer by the same species value in a dropdown.
- Josh Carlson
Kendall County GIS