Helping to conserve the world through better protected areas data

ProtectedPlanet

UNEP-WCMC, IUCN

Challenge ProtectedPlanet is the biggest project we have embarked ourselved up to date. The challenge consist on taking a very famous database, the World Database on Protected Areas, and bring it to the new era of applications. The database has been up to date curated by countries and organized by the World Conservation Monitoring Centre. The task is huge and the project was quickly needing smarter ways to improve its data.

Protected areas are the way conservation is nowadays enforced. Having good information about where are and how well are those areas protected is crucial in the effort of protecting biodiversity and the environment. With such a big goal we were sure we needed to apply our best.

Solution The whole project id being developed together with the great developers at the UNEP-World Conservation Monitoring Centre. Using a set of open source technologies for backend and front end development we were able to establish a solid foundation to start building on top. A nice user focus interface was developed to help discovery the wonders of the different protected areas; games to engage users to contribute on the massive effort to improve the data; analysis tools to measure carbon, protection density, etc... are being developed to create the most complete resource about protected areas on the web.

We wanted to play nice on the web. So being good web citizens means trying to not replicate other project but rather contribute to them and link data. Therefore ProtectedPlanet has deep links with Wikipedia, Panoramio and Flickr. On the conservation/biodiversity side the project is linked to GBIF and IUCN.

View online »

• ProtectedPlanet