Click. Contribute. Conserve
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 ...
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.
This update is after a seven month duration during which time the India Biodiversity Portal has been static compared to first six months. The development team has been busy with other projects. Also funding for the India Biodiversity Portal has been very limited during this period and thus we have had very limited staff working on the project. We hope to start development with additional features and additional data as soon as we get modest funding.
While this has been a quiescent period for the IBP, the development team has been very active with developing the platform with many additional features. The Urban Atlas Portal uses the platform (maplocator) and has been developing at a hectic pace with fancy flash-based user interfaces for navigation and content. The emphasis has been to build a portal for urban ecosystems which will be seeded with data from about 12 cities and hopes to expand to cover 100s of cities around the world. the site is to be launched by the end of this year and will be formally launched to the public in Aug 2010.
The base code has been reorganized so that the code base can be released as an open source project. The project, called maplocator will be put out on one of the public opensource platforms by January 2010. We hope this will slowly build a community of developers voluntarily participating in platform development and enriching is functionality at a quicker pace. We hope this will also help larger adoption of the platform in various situations where a map-based visualization will be helpful.
New features in the current release
- UI changes based on feedback. The layers that are availability are now shown as a tree with the number of layers in each category shown. This gives the ability to open multiple themes in the tree and explore the layers available. It shows a full table of contents of all layers available on the site.
- Search utility with a simple search and an advanced search. A simple Google like search box has been put in where you can enter a text and retrieve layers. The search results can then be displayed on the map. Advanced search can done as a geographical search based on a layer and features in a layer or to retrive features and layer within a bounding box. An attribute based advanced search is also available. These are first cuts of the search engine is available. But user interfaces and use cases must be examined to make the advanced search more efficient useful.
- With this release raster support has been added. This will enable various satellite interpreted vegetation maps to be deployed and displayed on the portal.
- A simple measurement tool has been introduced that can measure paths and areas.
- A synthetic layer ordering panel has been developed that also has certain controls like show layer information, zoom to extent, and close the layer in addition to layer ordering.
- Cross browser compatibility issues have been addressed. It now reads the browser and gives a message
if the browser is incompatible. - Three additional data layers have been added:
- Kanakpura schools biodiversity survey.
- India Landmark Trees
- India Tiger Reserves
- Western Ghats Vegetation 1
- Western Ghats Vegetation 2
Explore and enjoy the landscape!!
We need your feedback for constantly improving the portal. Use the forums of the feedback form to talk to us.
Contributing
- 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
News
The India Biodiversity Portal was presented in a poster session at the e-Biosphere09 conference in London. This was a historic first meeting of the biodiversity informatics community.
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 0.5 released on 1st December 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
The India Biodiversity Portal is promoted by the The National Knowledge Commission. Other Portals under this initiative are.
India Environment Portal
India Water Portal
Teachers of India
India Energy Portal
