Nongame Conservation Section Greg Krakow and NCS staff

March 1, 2017

Nongame Conservation Section

Our Mission: Conserving

Nongame Wildlife

Nongame means animals not

legally hunted, fished or trapped,

as well as rare plants and natural

habitats

Core Areas

• Rare Species Surveys and

Monitoring

• Environmental review

• Habitat Restoration

• Land Acquisition/Easements

• Conservation Planning

• Education and Outreach

Enter Data Process Data Present Data

Spatial SQL

Work Flow

Spatial databases work with Spatial Features to:

• Measure length, area, distance

• Modify creating buffers, merges, intersections, etc.

• Observe spatial relationships

• Create new geometries

• Return specific information about a feature and associated attributes.

• Aggregate spatial and non-spatial data

PostGIS, Carto and Spatialite

• PostGIS is a full feature multiuser, networkable spatial GIS database

• Carto as feature rich, open source, web mapping tool that fully supports PostGIS

• Spatialite is a single user, single computer spatial database that implements spatial SQL in a similar way as PostGIS

Enter Data

Network of independent agencies collecting and

analyzing data for biodiversity conservation

Biotics 5 is a web based GIS platform developed by NatureServe for managing biodiversity conservation data.

Process Data

How I use Spatialite

• Convert table structure: Makes it easy to assemble disparate feature data sets with various types of feature types and CRS into one data set.

• Clean up and organize data

• Transform data

• Aggregate data using spatial aggregation features such as spatial union (st_union).

Cleanup, convert and format

incoming spatial data

Get nearest stream to each

collection point

Aggregate data by most recent range

of years

~5.5 million streams ~500 sampling sites

With SpatiaLite kNN (K-Nearest Neighbor) indexing it took only 30 seconds.

Format some data

Aggregate some data

Traditional county range map

Quercus oglethorpensis Oglethorpe Oak

Traditional county range map

Quercus oglethorpensis Oglethorpe Oak

. . . with digital interactive maps we can make this data available online.

What can you do? Understand data acquisition needs

• Find locations to target for field surveys • Understanding missing database information

– In people’s heads – In institutions – From survey records

• Possible new locations for elements • Where elements have declined or are potentially

extirpated (when map units are adequately surveyed)

How was all this done?

Things tried but not used

Manual: • ArcGIS Spatial Join in

Analysis tools Automation: • Arc GIS Model Builder • Python & ArcPy • Python & QGIS • Python & OGR

Preparing the data

Biotics5 EOs records

Biotics5 Oracle View Select and format attribute

categories

Python/Spatialite SQL join & aggregate EO

info with range map units

CSV text files EO age attributes and range map unit names

Shapefile EO polygons and formatted

attribute values

Carto PostGIS Spatial Database

on the web

Shapefiles County, Watershed, Ecoregion, hexagon,

quarter quad

Still use Python as “glue” language but prefer Spatial SQL for processing vector data

The End

Spatial SQL

Thank you!