 Noor Salam is our next speaker. Noor is the database analyst at the Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves. She has spent the last three years focusing on managing Kentucky's natural heritage database and making sure that staff, botanists, zoologists and the land managers have all the GIS tools that they need to operate efficiently in the field. And her talk is titled modernizing data collection for field botany and management. So take it away Noor. Thank you so much Heidi. Can you all hear me? Yes we can. I am very thankful to have been invited to this amazing event and I'm thankful to be being amongst this amazing group of speakers. And I'm excited for showing you the work we've done with the botany team. And for anyone who didn't make it to Tara's earlier talk, I'm going to first give you a brief overview of the Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves team and mission. And here we go. So, our main one of our main missions is to secure a system of state nature preserves, promote scientific and spiritual values of our natural environment in Kentucky. We also provide a, we also recognize conserve and restore rare endangered plants by statute. And this is my favorite one, we are responsible for maintaining a database of information of spatial information on the environment plants and animals. We also administer a conservation easement fund called the Kentucky Heritage Land Conservation Fund. And so much more. We have two main branches, one is the natural areas. This team is responsible for all of our state nature preserves in Kentucky. They are responsible for various activities, such as prescribed fire invasive species removal and treatments, trail maintenance, whatever it takes to preserve these beautiful areas. Our second big team is the biological assessment team, and they are responsible for collecting rare threatened endangered species data on our preserves and across the state. My team is responsible for all data and GIS things. So, as I mentioned earlier, we have the biologists, they collect the data. How, where does the data go, how is it all used. It goes into a spatial database. And we have about 20,000 records of plants, animals, communities all over the state. How is the data used. We're not just collecting it to just keep it for ourselves we want it to be used to inform conservation decisions. And while the, a lot of this data is sensitive due to the, due to the rarity of these plants and animals. We share the data with a lot of local, federal and state partners to help with their decisions. We also share the data with the public and environmental consultants through this tool here shown at the bottom. It's our Kentucky biological assessment tool where you can get a species report on a project specific basis and become informed on potential issues or potential impacts you might have with future projects. This is not a full exhaustive list of our partners just an example of some of them. Anytime we can we're trying to reach the public and reach them with how much, how important Kentucky's natural areas are, and we want to communicate the value through environmental education. All right, so I'm going to first talk to you about why we want to modernize our data collection for botanists. Why was it necessary to bring about major changes. And I'm going to talk to you about why we took the approach that we did, because it's one thing to modernize data collection by whipping up a new a brand new GIS tool. Like the one I'm about to show you, but with careful planning and understanding of everyone's needs and conditions in the field, you can deploy the best GIS tool for your stuff. And then I'm going to talk to you about how so I'm going to show you how we did it I'm going to show you examples, and a lot of this work stems from discovering what's possible. There's a lot of things I didn't know before that I had to learn. And I'm so glad that it, it's contributing to our teams efficiency in the field. A lot of a lot like I said, our botanists go on our preserves natural areas but they sometimes have to survey other public lands or private lands with permission. We are responsible for 28,000 acres just on our preserves alone. Those are statewide. And you can imagine trying to do statewide surveys. It's very challenging. And the question we have to ask ourselves is how do we do that efficiently. We have a great team. We don't have an army of botanists. So we have to think about resources and time. And that's really important to me is making sure I'm making the botanist lives easier. You could technically do your surveys and grab your GPS pencil and data sheet and get right to work. That's what we used to do up until recently, because we found that we could save a lot of time, specifically time transcribing data from data sheets back into database in the office. We also found that we can create a lot more consistent data sets by modernizing our approach. And that's what we did. We decided to go digital. We used one of our available GIS tools survey 123 to configure a location smart form to collect our data very consistently in the field and in offline conditions. So using mobile devices, they can also be iPads that have a data plan. We can collect things like site name on the left date time. On the right, you will see the location on the map that was captured. We also created a dropdown menu for site inventories and it has really easily recognizable symbols for botanists to quickly be aware of the rarity or invasiveness of a specific species. Our botanists take a lot of metrics in the field. For example, floristic quality, invasive threat canopy cover. And lastly, on the very right, you can see that we took advantage of the capabilities of survey 123 to calculate some totals for us before even reaching the office. Now, where does the data go? It goes to an online data GIS database where records submitted can be seen in real time so you can sit in be sitting in the office and seeing oh so and so just submitted a record in McCreary County. Those records can also be downloaded at the end of the field season to be used in reports and so on. However, this is where it gets interesting. We had a little bit of a problem. Our botanists collect data on brand new plant records, which is really exciting when someone finds something new, but they also regularly need to revisit already mapped plant populations and document their current condition or status. So this means that I created this beautiful digital form, and then I had to ask them to enter a lot of information that we already had in our database in. Here's the thing, nobody has time for that. Here's why. I don't go in the field much when I do. It's in my free time and I'm birdwatching. I'm having wonderful time I'm on the trail. I'm not going off trail. So, after going on on a field trip with my colleagues to botanize or help them botanize, going off trail into the thick of it, discovering I discovered the meaning of a tick bomb. I quickly realized that it's not just a matter of making this digital form. It's really important to make the process of filling it out as seamless and quick as possible for them. So what if we didn't have to enter information we already knew about some sites and some plant records. Is that possible. It is. And so everything changed when I met Sunny Fleming from Esri. And this is where networking and events like this are really key to discovering things you didn't know before. I've known Sunny virtually since 2019, but this photo was taken three years, three years later in 2022, which was the first time we ever got to be in person. She introduced me to a lot of new resources that I didn't realize were available. And I'm always learning about other new resources every day. So, when that happened I learned that it was possible to further develop the digital forms that we talked about, and make them auto fill some information, just before you even open it. How does that work. It's a combination of what I mentioned before survey 123 and this other app called field maps previously previously known as collector. Here's for example, an area in Lexington in my field maps app that has a very old record of running buffalo clover. So I'm opening my map on my phone and I'm seeing this record. I'm going to click on that dots. It's going to open up what's called a pop up window. And it says a lot of information about this existing record but it also says start plant survey. What happens when you click that is really cool. Boom. These fields that you just saw are immediately auto filled. This is the aha moment in this presentation. And I still have yet to be more humbled out in the field but as we all already know and I've mentioned. Nobody has time to fill out unnecessary information specifically the database specific information that is really important to relate back to our existing plant records and reports. This method ensured that the process is as seamless and as quick as possible for our staff. Speaking of seamless. Let's talk about future work for this project. So what I'm showing you here is a dashboard that represents it like at a glance view of progress made out in the field, using those same digital forms that I showed you. This dashboard is not for our body project it actually was developed for tracking our conservation easement inspections throughout the state. And our goal is to create something similar as a resource for the botanist to track their field season progress over time. It's going to also make it a lot easier to process the data after you get back in the office because sometimes you want to edit something. Because you made an error in the field, or you had species that you didn't identify in the field and then came back to the office and used the wonderful weeklies floor key to do the identification. So you want to go back in there and enter that data that you just discovered. We also have a lot more to look forward to. Here's an example of reports that were designed for a different project called wrote the road rapid roadside habitat assessment project. And this is a great collaboration we have with the transportation cabinet. We adapted an existing digital form that was available out there for free. It was created by modern adventure. And we use that to create a site specific report template. And you can use that template to generate a consistent summary for every single site you visited. And it's a great way to share information with potential stakeholders. There, I talked about a lot of these just tools and these are usually available, especially for large organizations and heritage programs, but there are many other ways to modernize data collection. In fact, I naturalist is a great tool to collect location smart data with a consistent data entry. And it's also being used for science. We, we as the Office of Kentucky nature preserves we monitor entries on I naturalist and keep an eye open for rare plants and animals. There's other tools, for example, like edmaps. This is an important tool to collect data efficiently on evasive species. And there's a lot of other cool apps out there that both contribute to science and create a really good data such as a bird and so on. I would like to thank you for your attention. And I hope this was helpful to you or your program, and none of this work would be possible without the input of our staff listed here. And I want to give a huge shout out to Devin Rogers because his level of detail in the, in the design and the testing process, and the feedback he gives has been essential. And without without that the project wouldn't be where it is today. And before to closing notes. Before you. I want I want to make sure I hope I get re invited in the future to any native plant side events, even if my last slide is not a picture of a plant. I'm sorry, but I want to make sure that before you know you sail the way to the break. I wanted to make sure to ask if you had any questions about anything I showed you today. Thank you again for your attention.