09-10, 13:30–14:00 (America/Chicago), Grand F
Can opensource tools enable equitable access to parks for 40M people? Yes! Learn how California’s open Parks data is produced and maintained, using QGIS and PostgreSQL for continual updates, incorporating user input, and incrementally improving quality and release efficiency.
Providing equitable access to parks for people in the nation’s most populous state requires open data that is reliable, frequently updated, and constantly improving.
GreenInfo Network has built and sustained the nation’s best state-wide protected lands database for this purpose. For the last 20+ years we have updated and managed two open data sets – the California Protected Areas Database (CPAD) and the California Conservation Easement Database (CCED). This data depicts the wide diversity of parks and open spaces in California, ranging from the largest National Forests and Parks to small neighborhood parks, and underpins initiatives for park access equity, conservation analysis, land use planning, and more.
The “open” intention also extends to how the updates are sourced and curated – with close and consistent engagement that GreenInfo Network initiates with contributing agencies, data providers, and users alike.
The data has been maintained on PostgreSQL and QGIS since early 2015. At its inception it was stored in shapefiles, but this format didn’t support multi-user editing. Then for a period it was remotely hosted and managed on proprietary enterprise GIS software, but the challenges with maintaining relationship integrity between the various tables, in addition to the unwarranted complexity, cost, and staffing needs for this solution, made it untenable. The eventual switch to open-source in 2015 with PostgreSQL/PostGIS as the backend data store, and QGIS for editing the data, proved to be the solution with the most usability, functional support, ease of maintenance, affordability, and thereby longevity.
In this presentation we will share the history of this data, how it is successfully built and managed on open-source tools, and the incremental improvements these tools have enabled to data quality and to the efficiency of the release process. We will touch on the workflows that allow for incorporating user input, and highlight some of the applications that have been derived from the robustness and usability of this data.
