Platform update

Hello NatureMaprs

As we move into the cooler months and sighting counts begin to wind down our team has been working tirelessly to ensure our platform’s usability and performance. All merch has been posted out to our supporters who kindly left an app store review for the NatureMapr data collector app. In other news, the NatureMapr Team, in partnership with the NSW Biodiversity Conservation Trust Education Team have travelled throughout the Riverina Murray and Hunter regions to deliver landholder workshops as part of the Land Libraries program. So far the program has been a success, we have engaged with over 10% of BCT’s conservation agreement holders, who’ve been a pleasure to work with.

This program will see thousands of camera trap sightings uploaded to NatureMapr, to inform environmental management. We recognise the important work moderators undertake in verifying sightings and with this new influx of sightings on the horizon have made changes to the platform to support you. There will be continued improvements on the way to support moderators. Additionally, NatureMapr hopes to further invest in AI development to assist with the efficient verification of sightings. We would also like to offer our thanks to the several new moderators from NSW North Coast for joining. Please get in touch if you are interested in becoming a moderator for this region. We greatly appreciate the countless hours all moderators spend verifying sightings and hope we can continue this nature-positive journey together.

The following lists highlight the work we have done to address issues raised by our user community over the past few months and are divided into categories relating to our website, mobile application or both.

Website:

• Predefined moderator quick responses has gone live
• Performance and accuracy improvements to 'quick search'
• Moderator email alerts are now differentiated to personal email alerts
• Unverified sightings can be filtered on all sighting list pages using the new ‘View unverified’ button
• The ‘list’ view of maps has been consolidated, and species richness scores and survey effort figures are displayed correctly
• Now able to add any national species to a regional priority species list
• Verified government users receive a notification when they are linked to their trusted organisation
• Exports of individual user sightings fixed
• Commonly used symbols and terms are defined on our FAQs and Information handling and data quality pages
• Duplicate symbols and terms have been cleared
• Field guides now display four sample images for a species

Mobile application:

• View photos in detail whilst reviewing a sighting before upload by clicking on the photo
• Prevention of unintended text resizing due to accessibility settings to ensure a consistent and stable layout

Both:

• Consolidation and stock take of species' attributes platform-wide 
• Improved registration and login experience
• A new How-to-use guide video for the updated version of our app is available
• Assorted bug fixes

New useful features:

• When you cannot find a species on NatureMapr because a category page does not yet exist you can use the ‘Can’t find’ button when adding a sighting on our website, this will send a request to the relevant moderator or admin to create a new page for said species.
• The import tool which is used to upload up to 1000 sightings at once from an INaturalist account, biodiversity survey or just a collection of photos you haven’t uploaded in the past is now working smoothly.

In the coming weeks, NatureMapr will update the federal Department of Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Water on our platform’s development over the last financial year. In light of this, we would greatly appreciate your support of the platform, by leaving a positive review for us on either the App or Google Play stores as this will help our cause to ensure our platform’s continuation. If you have any questions regarding this post or suggestions for the platform, please comment them and a member of our team will get back to you.

Have a great week

From the NatureMapr Team