About the Website Beta Version

Welcome to the beta version of LandScope America, the new website about America’s natural places. Here we’ll tell you what you can expect from the beta version, as well as let you know what we’re still working on. (If you’re looking for a summary of the project, see the Project Overview. If you’d like to find details about the many features of the website, check out Overview of Features.)

“Beta version,” as you may know, is software-speak for “not quite done yet”. When building a tool as sophisticated as the LandScope America map viewer, it’s useful to have a period where you, our user community, can test it out, give us feedback, and help us revise and improve the product. So we request your understanding and help in doing just that.

As you browse around the website, you’ll surely find pages that aren’t complete, images that may seem out of place, and aspects of the map viewer that need fine tuning. Our approach is to open up the results of our work to you as early as possible, so that you can comment, point out what you like or don’t like, what’s missing, and how you’d like to see the site progress. We’ll listen closely to your comments, which will help shape how the site develops as we move from the beta version to LandScope 1.0 and beyond.

Map Viewer

The map viewer includes dozens of data layers, carefully selected and organized into five themes. For a list of the data layers included under each theme, see About the Data. Please note that we do not attempt to provide an exhaustive collection of all data available for any geographic area; existing data portals already provide this function for GIS users. Rather, we present a useful set of relevant data layers that provide insight into conservation issues without overwhelming you with information overload. In many cases, the data sets have been simplified and more detailed data and additional context is provided on the websites of our content partners.

Please be patient with the map viewer at first, especially if you have selected the Custom theme. Although we have speeded map viewer performance by caching map views, some screens may take several seconds to re-draw. We’ll be monitoring the performance of the map viewer as the number of simultaneous users increases, and we’ll take steps to improve the performance if things seem to be slowing down. And again, this is a subject where your comments will be important.

Notice the column on the right-hand side of the map viewer, which we call the “right rail”. The content displayed here under the Explore Related Items section changes dynamically depending on where you are on the map. This powerful feature comes with a caveat: because we are still building some of the advanced keyword and search functionality that powers this section, items from outside the map extent (i.e., from other places) often show up here incorrectly. Perhaps we should call it “Explore Distantly Related Items.”

Five Pilot States

We currently have a special emphasis on information about five pilot states where our state partners have developed extensive content: Colorado, Florida, Maine, Virginia and Washington, each of which has a detailed state home page. On the other 45 state home pages, you’ll find much less; detailed information for these states will be added throughout 2009 and beyond. Similarly, if you zoom into the map down to local scale outside of one of these five states, you won’t find many stories or photos about specific places yet.

Coming Attractions

There are a number of important features that we anticipate adding in coming months:

• You’ll be able to contribute your stories and photos directly and see them published via the map viewer, eventually turning LandScope America into a giant user-built encyclopedia of natural places across America.
• On the map viewer, we’ll be adding a Recreation and Exploration theme, as well as topo maps as a base layer.
• Much of the place-based multi-media content, such as videos and geo-narratives, is still in production.
• We are creating tutorials that will show graphically how to use various parts of the website and perform certain tasks, such as creating customized maps.
• We’ll build a map-based search for the Find a Land Trust page.
• Organizational profile pages for land trusts will be upgraded to allow land trust staff and volunteers to manage their own organizational profile and add news and features about their accomplishments.
• User profiles will expand, with features including the ability to set user preferences, manage “favorites” and saved maps, and track the content that you’ve contributed.
• You’ll be able to post comments on specific content or web pages.
• An advanced search feature will let you find and filter your search results by keywords.