Making Data Spatial: A Garden Inventory at the University of Rhode Island
Just around this time six years ago, I began my sophomore year of college at the University of Rhode Island (URI). My favorite class that semester was a plant biology lab, admittedly in part because of a budding (no pun intended) relationship with my lab partner, but also because of our frequent trips to the campus greenhouses. One of our first lab assignments was to give a short presentation on one of the plants housed in the Horridge Conservatory, a stunning collection of over 300 exotic plant specimens. I remember gasping with delight upon seeing the leaves of the sensitive plant (Mimosa pudica) quickly fold inward when my TA touched them ever so gently with his fingertip. I made a note to remind myself to come back to the greenhouse later so that I could spend a few minutes sitting on the little red bench by the koi pond, tucked away behind a monstrous banana (Musa acuminata) tree. The Horridge Conservatory, along with the University’s Botanical and Medicinal Gardens, are some of the most treasured spaces on campus, offering students, staff, and visitors a reprieve from the stresses of daily life.
Until about one year ago, garden managers for the Horridge Conservatory, Botanical Garden and Heber W. Youngken Jr. Medicinal Garden maintained their plant inventory data in a spreadsheet-based system. Garden managers found their current inventory system to be too robust, not user-friendly, and lacking in a spatial component.
Managers wanted an inventory system that would allow them to keep track of only the attribute fields they found necessary, to visualize plant locations on a map, to easily edit data in the field, and to share their maps with the public as they saw fit. GIS meets all of those needs!
My name is Maegan Shanaghan, GIS Specialist at URI, and here's how I got started on creating “The Gardens” GIS database.
Feature Class Creation
I began by creating two feature classes within a file geodatabase in ArcGIS Pro: a point feature class called “Accessions” in which each point represents a group of specimens of the same species in the same location, and a polygon feature class called “Locations” in which every polygon represents a garden location. Example locations include “Medicinal Garden Bed #1” and “Rose Garden”. I did not add any fields to the accessions feature class because those fields would be transferred over when I joined the existing spreadsheet data to the point feature class. To populate the point feature class, I used the ‘Points on a Line' tool along with a temporary line feature to generate the total number of accessions in the gardens (over one thousand features) in just a few clicks. The locations polygon feature class was created based on a hand-drawn map of the garden beds and contained fields for “Name” and “Garden”, with garden corresponding to which of the three gardens each location was associated with.
Joining the Data
After agreeing on fields they would like to track, Garden data managers ensured that each accession had an entry for the “Item Location” field. This would allow me to place each accession in its correct location polygon later. To join the data, I added the gardens excel spreadsheet to my ArcGIS Pro Project as a standalone table and used the ‘Join Field’ tool to transfer all fields from the gardens spreadsheet to the point features in the accessions feature class. The next step was to place the points in their correct garden locations.
Arranging the Data
To place the accession points in their correct garden locations, I used a series of “Select By Attributes” operations to select all of the points belonging to a single location, and then used the Move tool to drag the points to their garden location polygon. To arrange the points into a grid formation within the polygon, I used a combination of “Distribute Horizontal Centers”, “Distribute Vertical Centers”, and “Move” operations. There were 30 location polygons across the three gardens, so this part of the project was the most time-intensive.
Publishing
Once the accessions were in their correct locations, I published the accessions and locations feature classes as hosted feature layers to the University’s Enterprise Portal and shared the data with the group on the portal containing the gardens data managers. I then created an experience builder application for desktop viewing and editing and a field maps application for editing data in the field. Features of the web application include the ability to search for a plant and zoom to its location on the map, an editing tool to edit existing features and create new ones, and filters to display a selection of plants based on an attribute query. The Field Maps application is used to arrange plant locations more precisely and to capture images of plants.
Next Steps
Medicinal Garden Coordinator Elizabeth Leibovitz describes why this GIS-based inventory system meets her needs and how she intends to use the data in the future.
"Switching from spreadsheet based record keeping or accession-based record keeping to geospatial data opens up great opportunities for creating public-facing tours. Besides being a much more robust way to manage our collections internally, it will allow us to create engaging content for visitors that helps them navigate our collections thematically. We will be able to manage our garden-based collections with more accuracy and ease. The accession-based system we used when initially upgrading from excel-based management was not user friendly, nor would it be easy for us to share our data with visitors, a feature which required additional plug-ins. We are very excited about the GIS system allowing us to manage our collections at the next level, and store all kinds of metadata that allows us to be more successful."
The ability to publicly share maps and apps through ArcGIS Online is a major advantage of a GIS-based accession inventory. In the near future, we hope to create and publish thematic map tours that will guide visitors through the gardens, focusing on a subset of plants, such as "Rhode Island Natives" or "Memorial Trees".
Thank you for reading! If you have a story about managing vegetation in GIS on your campus, leave a comment below or reach out to me at mshanaghan@uri.edu.