OK, Travelers, this is your chance to add your input to how the National Park Service develops its websites. A prototype that revolves around birding in the parks is now in the testing phase, and we encourage you to see if it meets your demands!
As envisioned, this site can be a great tool for birders. Basically, you can view certified species lists, click on column headers to sort by that criteria, and download the data.
The detailed grid shows order and family in addition to the columns in the simple grid. If you click on a species name, it opens another page with information about that species. On that species page, the above-the-line NPS-specific information will include maps showing what other Park Service units that species is present or absent in, and there are additional buttons to search the NPS taxonomy service for other names, and the NPS documents catalog for documents, datasets, maps, images, about that species, either in that particular NPS unit, or in any NPS unit.
Additional links will lead you to external, but trusted, sources of information about the species, such as the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
At first blush this seems like a great resource...although the technical woes that have troubled the Park Service's websites of late can test one's patience. Another possible shortcoming that hopefully can be addressed is a lack of images. While there are links that will take you to other sites that carry photographs of the birds in question, it'd be nice to see a photo next to the basic information provided for the species so you don't have to leave the NPS site.
So....check out the site, and leave your comments below. We'll see that the proper Park Service personnel see them.
Once the final version is developed, individual parks will be able to add a birding page that's specific to their park.
Comments
I'm pretty sure that this new page is just a new front end to the NPSpecies database that could be addressed for quite some time now directly or through the SpeciesSelect sites. People who know their way around the Inventory & Monitoring parts of the NPS web sites have had access to all the data before.
A nice front end makes information retrieval easier for the general public and it is good to see that the NPS sees its mission to make the vast amounts of data as accessible as possible. Thanks for the good work.
MRC--
Bingo. This demo doesn't hit the live NPSpecies database, but the production version will. I'm trying to get better design ideas, especially for links to reliable external resources, and have everything ready to go for a public-facing application within a week of the authentication/sensitive data component of IRMA.
Jude--
I can't provide the ability to search what parks a particular species is found in in my demo, because I can't yet hit the full, live database on a public-facing server yet. The links to the searching NPS reports and datasets about a species are the same way. I hope to have a simple map applet on the internal NPS site in October, so it, too, will work when a public-facing site can go live.
I'd also note that the order (i.e., by order/family) doesn't go in the order most bird guides use. Looks like it arranges it alphabetically. I'm sure this is something you could add pretty easily though.