Case Study: NatureBlitz

We helped meet the North Central Catchment Management Authority’s (NCCMA) two fold goals of enabling the enthusiastic public to contribute to data gathering and designing a new avenue to educate the public about Victoria’s diverse wildlife and ecosystems.

Download Case Study Contact Us

At the heart of NatureBlitz are its robust data recording features, allowing users to recording not merely the location of wildlife sightings within the North Central Victorian region, but also photos and audio recordings of the specimen, among other information. This information will then be made available to the public, benefiting landowners, researchers, NCCMA’s Waterwatch program, land management organisations and students.

Additionally, the application is an invaluable resource for people traveling across Victoria’s majestic northern river country, offering an attractive and easy to navigate encyclopedia of our local fauna, complete with photos and even their sounds. This information comes supplied by the NCCMA, an authority on the environs of North Central Victoria. The NCCMA can also update this information remotely. A key feature of the application is that users can hike deep into the bush and lose reception without losing functionality, thanks to the app’s robust offline mode.

The Issue

Although civilians providing data to key stakeholders about the state of our local fauna isn’t new, NCCMA identified numerous aspects of the process that could be improved through a more formalised crowdsourcing of information. Officers of the NCCMA and other stakeholders would often receive verbal reports of wildlife sightings, creating an institutional knowledge that was prone to deterioration and not collected centrally in any respect. On the other hand, expert lead surveys of North Central Victoria’s wildlife are costly and time consuming. It was clear that the CMA would benefit significantly from a codified way for the public to submit recordings directly into their database. Additionally, the application provided an opportunity for the CMA to convert its online wildlife information into an offline resource users could take with them into national parks.

The Solution

Spatial Vision’s solution was a straightforward application that worked across all devices, with a robust offline mode that ensured the user’s functionality didn’t deteriorate when they were deep in the bush. Great care was taken to ensure the data collection process was intuitive for the casual nature-goer, while maintain the robust suite of features that our citizen scientists expect (and provide the greatest value for our communal research). To this end we allow our less technical users to simply attach their sighting to one of the apps’ pre-included species and add a spatial coordinate from their phone’s GPS, while more enthusiastic users can capture audio from the animal, take photos of it and fill in a number of text fields.

Key features included:

The Issue

The Solution

The Benefits