Cedar Box Heritage App – Spring 2018 Upgrade

A new Cedar Apps features and fixes code push started in April with a focus on improvements to the Heritage App. We are extending the Community Map functionality, and continue to align Item fields with best practices standards (see links below).

Stay tuned for new web Documentation and PDF Guide in the coming months

CIRA Indigenous Laws Project - App Tour Kitasoo and Xa'xas Nations

In the summer of 2015, Kitasoo/Xai’xais Nations joined the Indigenous Laws Project spearheaded by the Central Coast Indigenous Resource Alliance. Funding was found to hire 5 KX community researchers to work with 3 lawyers and assorted records management experts. A secure web application was built to house the resulting interactive database, a “Digital Archive”, of Collections, Items, Places and Case Briefs. As of Fall 2016, more than 1900 KX Items have been cataloged and ‘tagged’ using 50 different research fields—such as title, author, era, LUP theme, sensitivity, location, etc. These Items include maps, letters, charts, interview transcripts, books, photographs, reports, paintings, and carvings. The Items are grouped into 40 Collections, and have been collated into 29 Case Briefs. In addition, 201 Places have been identified.

Presentation at the Society of Conservation GIS Conferance Monterrey 2016

In June 2016, Charles presented at the Society of Conservation GIS Conference in Monterrey, California to speak about Cedar Box Apps. Scroll down to view the video of the talk. Or view the slides at http://www.slideshare.net/cnburnett/webgisbased-conservation-tools-for-first-nations-stewardship

Abstract
Marine stewardship in British Columbia is increasingly complex, contextualized by our First Nations? strong rights and title positions, and evolving co/management regimes. Small teams of fisheries managers, planners and technicians are being tasked with monitoring, assessment and planning tasks that would normally be the remit of well-staffed provincial departments. Over the last 10 years, First Nations stewardship managers have been searching for information systems that bring spatial analysis more efficiently and seamlessly into the day-to-day operations of all staff. Several decision-support systems have emerged using web-GIS technologies to address this challenge. Technically, these systems consist of: geodatabase back-ends (commonly PostGIS) and an HTML/JS/CSS front end, spatial libraries, and PHP or Python code. All of the systems do two key functions: (1) help to manage large cultural and ecosystem geodatabases, and (2) provide tools to mobilize the geo knowledge base in specific contexts such as: project/permit impact assessment, cumulative impacts assessment, compiling evidence to support legal cases. The geospatial analyses thus are varied: from proximity reports, to spatial modelling and visualization, to spatial key-phrase searches. Each system goes some way towards providing necessary efficiencies to stewardship office staff, but gaps remain. For example, the following features would be useful when incorporated: secure links to government databases, incorporating management tools outside of conservation (fee-simple lands, environmental management), mobilizing knowledge for schools, managing field survey data, and stewardship staff time-tracking and billing.

FYI: Also participating were ~20 young international scholars doing amazing work around the world: http://www.conservationgis.org/scgis/2016/ScgIntl2016A.html

Cedar 7 New Fields and Workflow Capability and Mail Harvest

We’re rolling out a few changes to Cedar 7 installations this month. Some are behind the scenes improvements to MailHarvest and file attachment listings.

However, some changes will be a little more obvious:

LIVE-LINK: Connecting Project Tracking to GIS

In a novel example of having your herring roe and eating it too, the CedarBox Team is pleased to announce that DevelopmentApp Projects can now be “live-linked” to your desktop GIS.

What does this linking between my Cedar App and my desktop GIS mean?

Let’s say you are tracking 500 project applications, and that you have uploaded location files (Shapefile, KML, Geomark, draw-on-map) for all of these. Great! You can already do basic overlap analysis in Cedar. But, to make beautiful wall maps, or to do complex analysis, you need to work in your desktop-GIS world.

With our new Live-Link add-on, these locations are now available as a layer that you can explore in Quantum GIS (free & open source) or ESRI ArcGIS.