Critical nature positive infrastructure update

Hi All,

Busy times at the moment for the team.

NatureMapr is critical "nature positive" infrastructure for a nation that values it's biodiversity in the year 2025.

Thanks to important support from our major partners (ACT NRM, Commonwealth, NSW BCT), we are most of the way through an intensive round of platform stability and refactoring work.

The platform is starting to run much more efficiently and is much more robust in terms of being able to handle very high traffic loads and stand up to attacks - you should notice this by way of page load times being much snappier, as we have optimised, merged, consolidated and decommissioned so many things. We are lightening the load on the application and our underlying infrastructure and to reduce overall complexity - this work is ongoing.

I wanted to provide a quick update re: some of the key things the team are working on at the moment and what's around the corner:

NSW BioNet data feed

We continue to work closely with the NSW BioNet team to progress this important data feed
(we know just a couple (of thousand) people are awaiting the activation of this exciting data link)

Accessing NatureMapr from large corporate environments

We have seen some cases of requests being blocked by our new Web Application Firewall as NatureMapr receives a large number of requests from some of these environments which appear as traffic from a single source to our infrastructure.

If you work inside of DCCEEW, CSIRO or a large corporate environment and have experienced any issues or "400 Bad Request" errors accessing NatureMapr from within your network - please contact us. We will work with your IT or infrastructure people to resolve.

Near term roadmap

• New priority species lists for the ACT including new BioSecurity invasive species lists (in progress)
• Bug related to dates from data import template using historical data import tool (in progress)
• Improvements to quick search results accuracy (soon)
• Improvements to taxonomy search tool accuracy (soon)
• Minor improvements to NatureMapr Data Collector mobile app re: audio files stored in gallery and meta data (soon)
• NatureMapr Data Collector mobile app will introduce support for re-ordering sighting images prior to upload (soon)
• Improvements to and consolidation of tools to manage moderator expertise and privileges (soon)
• Pre-defined moderator "quick responses" will provide a one-click way to provide common responses E.g. "Hi Contributor, thanks for your sighting. Your location appears incorrect, could you please review and amend the location of this record." or "Hi Contributor, thanks for your sighting. Could you please also provide a photo of the INSERT HERE. E.g. labellum or inside of reptile's mouth etc" (soon)
• "Duplicate a sighting" function will provide a fast way to duplicate a sighting's core information (E.g. location and date/time) but allow for a different species with different media files to be uploaded (soon)
• The Verify By function (which allows moderators to input a formal specimen ID from a herbarium or insect collection) will be enhanced to also allow an ecological report (PDF) to be uploaded which provides evidence of the record's verification (soon)
• Reintroduction of species Export button for field guides (soon)
• Species details page will be modernised in line with rest of the platform's updated look and feel (soon)
• Species will be migrated over into collection based architecture with legacy bespoke structures decommissioned (soon)
• Improved display of moderator expertise/categories on user profile pages for moderators (soon)
• New moderator activity information added to user profile pages for moderators (soon)
• Enhancements to privileges for collection moderators E.g. Glossies in the Mist (under way)
• Improved welcoming and recognition of expert moderators - public announcement as new expert moderators are onboarded (mid term)
• Ability for collections to define their own "attributes" (questions)
• Further improvements to dashboards and available metrics including clickable priority species links (soon)
• Further investment in AI and improved integration of AI image classification into the NatureMapr Data Collector mobile app (medium term large investment)

NatureMapr Data Collector app

This week we discovered a few (embarrassing) hiccups with user registration via the NatureMapr Data Collector mobile app.

I want to thank our team for their rapid response to these issues resulting in a vastly improved user registration and login experience that has just gone live after many early mornings and late nights - absolutely mammoth effort Tim and Katarina.

If you use the NatureMapr Data Collector app, please ensure you download this important update from the Google Play or iOS app store.

This reinforces our mantra that nothing is ever set in stone and even after 12 years, we continue to learn and find seemingly obvious things that can be improved significantly due to critical feedback from the user community and from our customers.

Stocktake of platform wide "attributes" (questions)

Katarina Christenson is doing a full stocktake of all "attributes" (questions) which display for categories and species platform wide in consultation with the community.

Over time, these questions have sprawled and introduced several maintenance and usability challenges.

This important stocktake work will standardise and simplify the questions across the taxonomy to make reporting of records more consistent and the maintenance of the platform simpler.

Projects which wish to collect project specific questions, will be able setup their own collection and define their own list of questions specific to their project.

NatureMapr will no longer provide support for taxonomy wide questions at species level - questions will be supported at the category and collection level only.

NatureMapr Merch Manager

Matthew Frawley has taken over responsibility for NatureMapr merch (shirts and hats) and is ordering our next batch of "thank you" merch to our supporters and contributors who kindly left a 5 star review on the Google Play or iOS App Stores - please keep the reviews coming and let us know if you would like some merch.

Citizen Science is a team sport

We thank our expert moderator community for their continued brilliance and all NatureMapr contributors for their important records which we are working hard to ensure get to the decision makers that need to know about them.