Click. Contribute. Conserve

Welcome Welcome to the India Biodiversity Portal. A unique repository of information on India's biodiversity. It is designed to harness collective knowledge, seek voluntary participation of users and establish a participative system of content generation, verification and usage. The Portal aims to facilitate and enable widespread participation by all citizens in contributing and accessing information on Indian biodiversity, that benefits science and society, contributes to sustainable future; and guide the development and use of this Portal. Your participation is vital. We welcome your feedback. More ... Welcome

Map List

Right now, we have about a hundred maps of various aspects of biodiversity. This list is rapidly growing.

  • Click here for the full list of maps currently available.
  • If you have a map to contribute, mail support at indiabiodiversity dot org or fill in the feedback form.

How to participate

A central principle of the India Biodiversity portal is to create structures to facilitate large scale participation of individuals and institutions. We will reach out to researchers, amateurs, naturalists, students, institutions and the public to facilitate and enable their participation. The success and sustainability of the portal will depend upon the extent and strength of large-scale participation.

You can participate by providing complete layers that will be deployed on the portal. These layers will be deployed with complete attribution to the data provider. All data will be deployed on the commons license and will be freely viewable by everybody. However, the data provider can decide on the any category of commons license under which the layer data is deployed. For details on licensing refer to the forums or on feedback form and we will respect your contribution and get back to you.

What's New

The India Biodiversity Portal is constantly evolving. We intend to keep the site in perpetual beta. Features and data layers are being added - and we intend to work on a monthly update cycle, and a major release every six months.

The April monthly update has been delayed. It was deployed on 24th April 2009.

User interfaces have been improved. It has been simplified for the common user with advanced menus in the More... options. We have integrated flash components to allow a richer user interface. During this period we have also tried to make the portal code cleaner and modular.

The following are the list of features deployed with this release

  • Performance: deployed on physical host located in India, client side performance improvements to reduce client/server calls, use tiling for mapserver images
  • Automatic zoom: Enable automatic zoom-in for better usability
  • Data Upload: KML data upload functionality (beta quality)
  • Flash UI: Attractive flash UI for LayerSelector and LayerOrdering windows for better usability.
  • UI redesign: design changes in UI to simplify the interfaces.
  • Code re-organization: Separated core platform and applications(IBP, UAP) code, cleaned up database, UI and processing code for better maintainability

The following are the platform expansion activities during this release:

  • The India water portal has shown interest in using drupal and the map module as maplocate for its site. This will be a significant development in deploying an instance of the platform in true open source spirit. It will also help in maturing and generalizing the platform.
  • The code has been reorganized to make it more modular. The subversion repository has been reorganized so that we can release the source code as an open source project. It still needs to have packaging, build and deployment scripts worked out to release it as a usable open source project.
  • The Stockholm resilience center has contracted with the technology partners GSLAB for the development of the portal for the Urban Mapping project. This project will server maps of 12 cities of the world.
  • As a voluntary effort, a group of developers got together to try embed a light weight map component to an election information portal electionspot. The data for the portal was mined out of the election commission site and linked to the map.

We need your feedback for constantly improving the portal. Use the forums of the feedback form to talk to us.

Contributing

India Biodiversity Portal
To contribute to a layer, follow the steps detailed below:
  • You should be a authenticated in user to contribute to the site. Register on the site and login using your username and password.
  • If you are a logged in user, you will see an "Add Feature" icon on the tool bar of the map page.
  • Click on the "Add Feature" icon
  • This will show a dialog with a drop-down list of layers on which you have permissions to add a feature
  • Select a layer in which you would like to add or edit a feature
  • The selected layer will be displayed on the map; an icon with a point or polygon feature will appear on the map; and a pop-up details the steps to add a feature to the layer.
  • Zoom to the area of interest.
  • To a new feature and annotate it follow the steps detailed below:
    • Select the add point / polygon / line tool.
    • Add a feature, fill the pop-up form and submit.
  • To annotate an existing feature follow the steps detailed below:
    • Zoom into the feature you want to annotate and click on the feature
    • In the pop-up, click on "Click for Details"
    • In the appropriate table, click on the "Add" link, fill the pop-up form and submit
  • The added feature will be visible when the layer is reloaded
We currently have six participatory layers. These are shown in a separate tab on the layer picker dialog. Some of the participatory layers are for restricted participation. If you would like to add features to these layers you must be a layer member and be allocated required privileges. Please send a mail to request membership in these layers through forums or on feedback form There are two ways in which to can contribute to any of these layers. You could add a new feature and annotate it, or annotate and add details to an existing feature. If you encounter any problems or issues, please send a mail to support at indiabiodiversity dot org or report on the feedback form. Thanks for your participation

News

The IBP team presented a paper on IBP and the platform it was built on at Geomatrix '09. The paper was well received, by all accounts, and as a nice little bonus, we bagged the Best Poster Award!

Read the whole story, with links to the paper and the poster

Version

The platform is on version 0.4 released on 23rd April 2009. For a list of changes, please refer to the release notes.

Grants

ATREE announces grants that could be used for biodiversity conservation in the Western Ghats. These ciuld be used to create maps for the India Biodiversity Portal. Note that the grant evaluation is completely independent, and this is only for information. For details look at the call for proposals and the small grants program

Other Portals

National Knowledge Commission The India Biodiversity Portal is promoted by the The National Knowledge Commission. Other Portals under this initiative are.

India Environment Portal India Environment Portal

India Water Portal India Water Portal

Teachers of India Teachers of India

India Energy Portal India Energy Portal