The Conservation GIS Reference project is an attempt to classify Conservation GIS workers & researchers, their projects, and the presentations they give into a single searchable database. It’s goal is to improve the ability of an interested practitioner working in a specific area of conservation GIS to discover and learn more about that area and their peers. Normally one would do a “literature search” looking for papers related to the chosen problem. This project is more of a “people search”. Conservation GIS workers often tend to remain interested in the same issues for a long time, and their papers tend to reflect similar approaches and developing theories and skills. So the idea of using people as a grouping method for projects & presentations seemed worth pursuing.
For the initial study, 10 years of presentations organized by the Esri Conservation Program at it's annual conference, and 20 years of maps & presentations at the Society for Conservation GIS annual international conference were chosen, amounting to about 1700 talks and maps. To that was added 30 years work evaluating and selecting grantees for the Esri Conservation Grants Program, the Conservation Technology Support Program hardware & training grants, and the Society for Conservation GIS annual scholarship competition & selection. The latter effort has also led to the creation of detaile illustrated profiles of the SCGIS International Scholars, who were and are an important segment of the global conservation activist & worker community, numbering well over 500 as of 2019.
The chosen platform is GEONET, which is currently the default social network platform for some 300,000 global GIS professionals, and which has a rich set of functions for creating professionally designed content, and interlinking content into a searchable online database. Geonet supports a dozen different types of written and image content, and for this project their “document” container was chosen as most appropriate. GEONET supports master search and common tagging across all content types. For this project, embedded text tags were used, so as to keep the native tagging function free for a user’s own purposes. GEONET is an open-edit platform, all documents can be set to allow editing by anyone.
The Classification was created from the definitions and terms used to define and group annual conference papers into sessions and tracks, as enhanced and modified with additional terms describing interests, methods and skills that the scholar review & selection process used. The classification is published separately.
