The Spatial Portal focuses on where a chosen species was located, what species were found in a defined area and what are the environmental conditions in that area.

The Spatial Portal combines three basic data types – species, areas and layers – to provide a suite of powerful visualisation and analysis tools. Species can also include assemblages of species or high taxa (genus, family etc.) as a single mapped layer. Areas can be defined by 14 different options including digitising on screen to importing. ‘Layers’ refer to either environmental (gridded structure with continuous values such as temperature) or contextual (polygonal areas with class values such as a land use layer with a forestry land-use class) geographic data that can be thought of as a layer draped over the map; commonly used in Geographic Information Systems (GIS).You will soon also be able to map occurrences of species based on an associated facet such as the institutional provider or the record type (specimen or human observation for example).

Summary of the Functionality

More information on carrying out each of the functions can be found by clicking the links below: