ESRI CONSERVATION DATA MANAGER
TUTORIAL

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
EXAMPLE: PARK DATA INTEGRATION
THE AREA OF CONCERN
SUSCEPTIBLE COMMUNITIES
PROXIMITY IMPACTS
QUANTITATIVE PLOT DATA
NEARBY COMMUNITIES
ASSATEAGUE ECOLOGICAL DATA
BOTANICAL DATA
PARK DISTRIBUTION DATA
CONSERVATION STATUS
PARK DATA SOURCES
PARK STAFF DATA
PARK BIOGEOGRAPHY
ASSATEAGUE REGIONAL ECOLOGY
ASSATEAGUE DISTRIBUTION DATA
SUMMARY


INTRODUCTION

The ESRI Conservation Data Manager (CDM) is a set of ArcView2 and dBase tools for managing data in both tabular and spatial environments. A great deal of scientific and conservation data is stored on computers in tabular form (consisting of rows and columns), including species lists, specimen databases, and quantitative plot data. Database managers like dBase and Foxpro are popular and well-established choices for using tabular data. Scientific data also frequently includes spatial data, such as latitude-longitude, physigraphic descriptions, location descriptions, directions and place names. This spatial data can be explicitly represented and managed using geographic information system (GIS) tools like ArcView. The Conservation Data Manager is the union of the best tools for desktop spatial and tabular data management into a single integrated tool.

The CDM has the following advantages

- DATA INTEGRATION: Integration of many different types of data

- MODULAR DESIGN: Database handling, Analyses and interface are completely independent

- EASY MODIFICATION: Very easy to modify and customize

- OPEN GROWTH PATH: Accommodates new object-oriented databases and interfaces.

There is a wide variety of scientific data, but without integrated tools for managing these different databases and working with them in a single environment, we instead have to conduct conservation analysis manually as we have always done.


EXAMPLE: PARK DATA INTEGRATION

Assateague Island National Seashore has gotten reports of off-road vehicle activity in certain areas. Assateague is close to populated areas and off-road drivers represent a political force. Managers need to examine the potential impacts of such activity and try to come up with recommendations on whether and how much should be spent to control this activity and to mitigate its effects.


THE AREA OF CONCERN

To get some idea of the area of impact, this is a color infra-red aerial photo if the area of concern in the center of the park. It shows general vegetation patterns as well as the clear strip areas of the problem roads along the right and across the center. Using the photo link we can look at type photos of some of these vegetation communities. The denser red areas that the road passes through are Pine woodland, not likely to be easily traversed by vehicle and hence less of a concern. Let's look instead at the more open vegetation where the east-west road joins the beach road at the right-center of our view.


SUSCEPTIBLE COMMUNITIES

Here we can see that these communities are dwarf shrubland, likely to be inviting to the ORV driver. We need to find out more about this shrubland to see what it's conservation status might be, if it is rare locally or regionally or has rare species, and what sorts of impacts it might be susceptible to.


PROXIMITY IMPACTS

Using the ArcView Identify function we find that this is a Hudsonian tomentosa dwarf shrubland and the particular community we selected is about 8,500 square meters in extent. We can also use some linear measurement tools to find out how far it extends from the road, and in this case the figures at the lower left tell us that the southern tip of this community lies about 100m off the road. ArcView and ArcInfo also allow specific buffer polygons to be created around problem roads, to help us define impact zones more precisely.


QUANTITATIVE PLOT DATA

It would help to see if we had any quantitative data in this area. Our database shows only one quantitative vegetation plot, #47AB02, with a scan of the field forms so we can examine the species components and also check a plot photo. From this photo we can see that this is a marshy community not likely to be affected by vehicles and hence not of much use to the current question



NEARBY COMMUNITIES

By selecting all of the communities within 100m of the intersection we can use proximity to narrow our search for impact effects. Once selected, we can examine the ArcView table to see at a glance the identity of all the selected communities (here highlighted in yellow). From this point ArcView would let us create summary statistics and charts on area or perimeter. What we would really like to do, though, is dig deeper into other scientific databases to see what we can find out about the ecology and rarity of these communities. For this purpose we need to switch over to the Foxpro side of the Conservation Data Manager.


ASSATEAGUE ECOLOGICAL DATA

This is the main screen for the Nature Conservancy ecological database for Assateague park. This gives us a host of general ecological data on the dwarf shrubland community as a whole, and indicates that ORV impacts are a known threat. It also gives us a specific species list. Even though we have almost no data on other occurrences of this community in other parks, we can use the species components as a key to other parks to see how threatened they might be and use this as additional evidence.



BOTANICAL DATA

The species list in the TNC database is linked to a national flora, which lets us check taxonomic data and photographs of the different component species. This database might also contain global conservation rankings and status for each species to aid us in estimating relative threats to the community as a whole.

The species list is also linked to the NPFLORA database, allowing us to see a list of other parks where the species is found and get a relative idea of it's status in other park areas and where they are.



PARK DISTRIBUTION DATA

This shows the list of parks known to contain Hudsonia tomentosa, along with the status of the species at each park from NPFLORA. For Assateague, we can see that the last data is from 1984 where Hudsonia is listed as a widespread native of unknown abundance and rarity. Lets see if any of the other parks provide anything interesting.


CONSERVATION STATUS

Here we see that Indiana Dunes park lists this species as a state threatened species. For our parks we would also like to find out about management to see how well protected this species might be in these parks. Indiana Dunes is one of the few parks in our list with this data, and from the detail screen at lower right we see that they mapped some vegetation in 1983 but need new maps for Threatened & Endangered (T&E) monitoring. They also have resources management and general management plans on file. It would be useful to dig deeper into these activities for any park, to find out what is known about the data sources for these conclusions, as well as any experts who could answer questions for us.



PARK DATA SOURCES

Here we see a list of data sources for Indiana Dunes park. We can see that the report on threatened species might well have data on our species on concern, Hudsonia. We can see at the bottom a list of the authors with their roles defined. Martin Bowles and Pam Benjamin are listed as authors and their phone numbers are given, a service not normally found in bibliographic databases. We also have another source for science contacts at the park, the park staff.


PARK STAFF DATA

Here we can see part of the park staff list, at center. We can see that Pam Benjamin is listed on the park staff, and the Bob Daum is listed as the park IMC and NRC, which our code lookup shows is the Inventory & Monitoring Coordinator and the Natural Resources Coordinator. The strength of design using these tools is that the contacts database is a single table, with authorship or staff relationships handled as different relationships. This is why the business phone number listed as a standard part of the staff list is available to us in the author database, since it is coming from the same place.

Having examined the scientific and management data for our list of parks, we would now like to have a look at where they are and to see if any spatial or biogeographical patterns of interest. To do this, we will need to link our management database to a national map of parks which includes national biome and physiographic data. For this we need to return to ArcView.



PARK BIOGEOGRAPHY

Here we can see a map of the parks containing Hudsonia, and we can immediately see that these are all northeastern parks of lake and ocean shoreline areas. We can also see that Assateague lies close to the southern limit of this species, and therefore might be especially sensitive. Lets zoom in to the parks around Assateague to see what else we can discern about the region.



ASSATEAGUE REGIONAL ECOLOGY

Here we can see the Assateague region, with the flat coastal landforms of our 4 parks in contrast to the folded belts of the Appalachians. As for biomes, we see that Assateague and Colonial NP lie in the northern extent of the West Atlantic mixed pine biome.

Now that we have learned a little more about Hudsonia and it's community ecology, there are a few unanswered questions regarding our off-road impacts in Assateague, so let's zoom all the rest of the way in to our impact area to see if we can find all the other areas of Hudsonia and get a better local idea of how widespread it is given that our NPFLORA database told us it was a "widespread native"

ASSATEAGUE DISTRIBUTION DATA

Here we have selected all occurrences of the Hudsonia community and can see that it is of limited distribution and is concentrated in the area of concern. Even using the limited databases at our disposal, we were able to use the various linkages to gather enough evidence and other sources of expertise to help us begin a protective effort in response to the threatened impacts.


SUMMARY

The ESRI Conservation Data Manager (CDM) is powerful tool for managing scientific from a wide variety of sources. CDM-ArcView allows ArcView2 applications to be integrated with existing tabular data which may or may not be consistently geo-referenced. It adds a number of multimedia handling functions to ArcView and tools for sending and receiving data to other programs. The manager includes full support for handling of multimedia data via normalized data tables. It is based on a set of management practices and standards for database design, functional design, and application design followed at ESRI for large GIS projects and software development at the workstation level. This program is schema-driven, allowing outside databases to be incorporated by simply describing them to the program schema. It is designed to be easily modified at 4 different levels of user skill, ranging from novice to expert. CDM is available for Windows machines, and a Macintosh release is planned. CDM is ideal for CD-ROM publishing because it is PC-based, easily modified and fully compatible with ArcView data publisher so that both the ArcView and Foxpro elements are distributable as stand-alone .EXE programs. Source code and programmer documentation, as well as customization services, specialist consulting and GIS database development are all available from the ESRI Conservation Program at the address listed in Appendix A.

CDM-Foxpro allows the management of complex databases with multiple many-to-many relationships. It allows the Arc geo-relational model to be correctly implemented in a tabular-only data management environment. It starts at a main screen from which you select the particular database view. A view is presented as a main display screen with the master scrollable list of all selected database records and a number of detail buttons which will bring up detail lists and screens. You can control which records are available by searching within a view. You can print out the list of records or save them to a file and edit that file from the view. CDM-Foxpro can be easily modified for local needs and can include many types of multimedia and GIS data.

Additional Technical support and additional information about the program is available from the addresses listed at the end of appendix A.