Digital Assets for Local Wildlife Sites

Local Environmental Record Centres are one of the main custodians of Local Wildlife Site data often managing complex data for thousands of sites. In this talk Dan shares a digital system created by Digital Ecology to automate the creation of key outputs shared by NEYEDC (North and East Yorkshire Ecological Data Centre) with their customers. He also explains the importance of LWS in the planning system and the role of these outputs in helping to protect and manage sites.

Dr Dan Carpenter is a Digital Ecologist working at the interface of ecology and digital technology. He is interested in how digital tech can be harnessed to help deliver better biodiversity outcomes.

Q&A with Dr Dan Carpenter

Where does all the information that is used in the tool come from and is it public? For the NEYEDC tool, the information was all data that they hold as a Local Environmental Record Centre. The tool essentially brings all of this data together and collates it into a citation output. The citation contents are only as good as the data held for any given site. With such a large number of sites to manage data for, the tool enables NEYEDC to pull this information together in a much quicker manner to produce the outputs that their clients require.
Can the output format be tailored to suit the user of the tool (for example as a PDF) and how would the user implement this? Yes – the output can be tailored to be other formats, such as PDFs or webpages. NEYEDC needed an editable output as they were adding information to the outputs (such as site descriptions). This data is then added to the database so that in future outputs it would automatically be included. Digital Ecology are very happy to tailor the tool for potential customers and encourage them to get in touch: info@digital-ecology.co.uk
Is the tool in its final format and are you open to tailoring it for other users? The tool was very much designed to meet the needs of NEYEDC. It’s inevitable that other users will want it to do different things in different ways. Adapting the tool is possible through alteration of the code and Digital Ecology are happy to discuss the needs of other users: info@digital-ecology.co.uk
Was there much preparation required for the raw data and would you expect other data holders to have similar or more/less?
There was some data cleaning required, some of which NEYEDC did, some of which Digital Ecology did. Some data cleaning is inevitable for a tool like this; NEYEDC took it as an opportunity to make sure their data was up-to-date. Data cleaning is certainly something that Digital Ecology can do.
How far can R Markdown go with customising the maps – e.g. legends, buffers, including other sites in a buffer? Would you have to first customise this on QGIS or is it something you’d include in the code?
Maps are completely customisable in the code – no need to create something in another programme first.
Would odt have better formatting and enable you to output a batch of reports in odt and then use another programme to batch convert them to nicely formatted pdfs?
This is the reason we use odt as an interim step. The odt files were converted using LibreOffice on the command line.