Presenters:
Andrew Bawiec
University of Southern California
The San Diego Natural History Museum’s (SDNHM’s) Biodiversity Research Center of the Californias (BRCC) is a major biodiversity repository in southern California that directs a leading natural sciences research program with over 600 years of collective experience documenting and researching specimens throughout the region. One of the major challenges they face, however, is the development and integration of modern geospatial workflows to catalog, update, and share spatial data. To address this challenge, SDNHM partnered with the USC Spatial Sciences Institute (SSI) to develop an ArcGIS Hub featuring SDNHM’s existing data and resources to support biodiversity research. This project helped to rebuild SDNHM’s geospatial data management infrastructure using a central hub, making for more accessible data and more efficient geospatial workflows. The centerpiece of this Hub is a BRCC project geodatabase displayed with a public interactive map created through ArcGIS Experience Builder. The Hub helps improve BRCC’s project management and communication and can serve as a tool for future SDNHM marketing and development teams to communicate BRCC’s work to the public and potential funders. The partnership between BRCC and USC SSI also supports experiential learning for one of USC’s undergraduate students, providing real-world, hands-on geospatial application development and problem-solving skills.
