Functionality and Use
Central to the portal are maps on various aspects of biodiversity and conservation. The platform enables users to visualize the available maps, navigate to areas of interest on the map, add features and comments on the map.
Base Map
The base map provides the background visualization for the maps. These base map images are fetched from Google maps directly by the client browser based on the view port. You can choose from Google Physical, Google Satellite, Google Hybrid, and Google Streets, from the drop-down menu. On slow networks, fetching the Google images as tiles from the client could take some time.Map Tree Panel
The portal consists of layers or maps organized by Themes and Geography. Themes show a collection of the maps into different groups that are relevant to biodiversity and conservation. Geography shows maps organized into an India level maps, and maps of specific locales. The layer tree on the left shows all the maps currently available on the portal. Click on a category to expand the tree and show a list of maps available in each category. Click on the check-box next to the map to display the map. The currently displayed map will be in bold and will show the top-most active map on the portal. The title of active map will also be displayed on the map above the map navigation toolbar. Features on this map are clickable. You can display multiple maps on the base map. All maps other than the active map displayed will be faded but will be visible on the map. Often, clicking on a map will display the map in the map frame, but the map may not be visible. This is because the map is of a small area and the map view shows a larger area and does not show at the current zoom level. If you want to see the features in this map, you have to zoom into the area of the map. You can do this by clicking on the "Zoom to Extent" icon next to the map. This will zoom into the the extent of the displayed map and show the features on the map. Often, when you are zoomed into an area and you click on another layer, you will be shown a pop-up saying the features of the map are outside the current extent. You can choose to zoom to the extent of the currently displayed map or you can choose to maintain the same extent. If you choose to maintain the same extent, you will not be able to see the features of the newly clicked map. At any time, you can zoom to the extent of any of the displayed maps, by clicking on the "Zoom to Extent" icon next to the map in the tree. Clicking on the map name will pop-up the map information. This shows a summary of the extent of data attached to the map and a brief writeup about the map. Details of the map information pop-up are explained in the following section.
Layer Manager
Click on the icon in the tool bar on the left panel to bring up the layer manager. The layer manger shows all the maps currently displayed. The top-most map in the layer manager is the active layer. The active layer will also be shown in bold in the tree and is displayed on the map panel, above the map navigation icons. Note that only the top-most layer is clickable. The features of the active layer are also prominently displayed on the map, while all other layers are visible, but faded from view. The Layer Manager allows you to reorder the layers and change the active layer. To make any other map in the layer manager the active layer, click on the layer and drag it to the top of the list. Now this will be the active layer. It will be seen in bold in the layer tree, the name will be displayed on top of the map panel icons, the features in the map will be displayed brighter than the features of all other layers, and the features will be clickable. The layer manager also has an information icon that will launch the map information pop-up. If layers are participatory, it shows a participatory icon. And you can close a layer and remove a map from the map view.
Map information Pop-up
The map information pop-up can be accessed by clicking on the map name in the layer tree, by clicking on the map title on the map panel and by clicking on the information icon in the layer manager The map information pop-up lists all the data that is associated with the layer. It shows the attribution, the license if any, associated with the layer, the individuals who have worked on the data for the IBP. Below the basic attribution and related data, it lists associated data with the layer. Click on the + to see the layer attributes. This panel shows the data that is associated directly with the map. For each feature of the map, there could be additional data. For example, at a water body location there could be a list of bird sightings. These are organized as linked data to the layer. There could be one or more linked data. Click on the + to see details of linked data. For any column in the data, there could be some general information available. For example, if there is a species associated with the data, the species could have additional taxonomic, habitat, photo essay or any other information. This data does not concern the particular location, but is like a library resource on an item in the data. These are designated as resource tables. Click on the + to see the details available on the resource associated with map.
Feature Pop-up
Click on a feature to see more details on the feature. This will bring up a pop-up attached to the feature that shows a summary of associated data with the feature. Click on the details link to see all the details associated with the feature. If there is linked data associated with the map, the linked data will be shown as a tab in the feature details pop-up. Click on the tab to see linked data. If resource tables are associated with the data, these will be shown as links in the details table. The details table can be sorted, searched and paginated to the desired number of rows to be shown.
Legend
The legend tab is accessed by clicking on the tab in the right panel. This will bring out the legend tab. The legend is currently available only for polygon layers. The legend shows the categories and the color code for each category.