 Welcome to this tutorial we have put together to help you get the most out of BC species and ecosystems explorer, or BCSEE. The BC Conservation Data Center, or CDC, assists in the conservation of our province's biodiversity by collecting and sharing scientific data and information about plants, animals, and ecological communities in BC. BCSEE provides you with information and useful resources about species and ecosystems, as well as the ability to search with various criteria and provide you with a list of species and ecological communities that may potentially occur in your area of interest. Remember to also use the CDC IMAP application to view locations of species and ecological communities at risk in BC. Instructions for this can be found on the BC Government YouTube channel as well. Let's begin. I'm going to start with an overview of all the various searches that you can conduct with this tool. First, you can see we have a search and a help tab. We have a quick search, so if you want to generate results of all the red listed species and communities in BC, you can choose this, or red and blue list, or federal species at risk act designated species here. We can do a basic search by element name, by various groups. And as we open these up, you can see your options are quite large. We've got non-vascular plants, fungi, and ecological communities. Under the advanced search, we can select by various native or endemic attributes, conservation status, so whether it's on the BC red, blue, yellow list or extinct, provincial status, global status, COSIWIC status. For more information about each of these searches and criteria, you can click on this blue help. You can search by legal designation, habitat type for species only, or area based. So searching by area is restricted to red, blue, and legally designated species. And this search will result in species and ecological communities that are potentially within these areas. You can search by ministry of environment region, forest district, regional district, or municipality, although that is only available for ecosystem search, biogeoclimatic units, and ecoregion classification. Now let's do a few searches, starting with a really basic one. As I start typing in a species name, you'll see the options will come up. Let's choose burrowing owl, and have a look at the information that's returned on the results page. Now we can see which biogeoclimatic units this species occurs in. We have the provincial status of S1. Now if we click on this blue help button, it does tell us what S1 stands for. So we can see here it means it's critically imperiled within BC. And last reviewed in 2015. It falls in the BC red list. Again there's lots of information here to tell you what a BC red list means, or blue or yellow. It is globally designated as G4, which means it is apparently secure globally. An endangered Cossiwick status, and it falls under the seroschedule 1. These are also various legal designations that you can read up on. And we see that we do have maps known locations. So if there's a globe here, we know there's a maps known location of burrowing owl. Clicking here takes us to a Google map interface where we can very generally see where we have maps known locations of this species. And clicking on each one of these will show you which of those locations we're looking at. Now if we want to know more about this location, we can click on detailed map and report. That will take us over to the CDC IMAP application and zoom in on that actual element occurrence. And from there we can use IMAP. I'm not going to do that now. Let's go back to our results page. And under the reports, we've got the BC species summary. Now this provides a lot of information on the natural history of a species or community. Lots of information about ecology and life history. The conservation status report will tell us kind of the reasons that it's been given a particular rank. So we can see it's a range extent, the reasons it's been given a particular rank, different population numbers, lots of good information in there, the threats to that species. This again goes to the Google Maps. We also have links to other useful databases. So in this case, because it's an animal, we link to e-fauna. If this was a plant search, we would have e-flora listed here. Environment Canada's websites, the global report put out by NatureServe Explorer, any brochures, reports, recovery and management plans, best management practices that are relevant to the species, and a lot of other references. At the bottom here, there's an image search. So this just conducts a Google image search. If the conservation data center has an image of the species, there will also be a link to that. Now let's do another type of search. I'm going to choose new search. Let's do a search by a group. And we expanded these earlier, but you can see that as I pick lichens, it's ticking that box. We can do a search and see this little mushroom is showing us it's a lichen. And we've got a lot of information about the different lichens that you can find in BC. As you can see, we have 578 records here. We'll do another search. Now one thing to note is that whatever you choose here for groups, applies to your advanced searches down below. And we'll see some examples of that in a moment. Now let's say we're interested in all the serolisted species that's under legal designation. So serolisted species, but only for plants. And here are our results. We have 74 records of plants that are serolisted. Now a couple things to note here. You can export all of these details to Excel or tab separated value. There's a link to the field definitions. It gives you a bit of explanation of what the information means. Now if you do export to Excel, just note that there's more information than you see here on the screen because we just couldn't fit it in there. So it can be useful, provide you information such as distribution and habitat types. Another thing to note on the results page is that you have this search criteria explanation. Now if the results you're getting are not what you expected, it's good to look here because you can see whether the query is using an add or an or statement. Now this is quite a simple one, but you can do quite complicated ones. Let's do a new search. Now this time let's choose animals within an area based search. So let's go with the Fraser Valley Regional District. Now one thing to note here is we see municipality is only applicable to ecosystems. Because we only have animals checked off here, it's not giving us the option for the municipality search. If we do click on ecological communities, we can go down to say specify Abbotsford within the Fraser Valley Regional District. And our results will show us ecosystems within Abbotsford and animals within the Fraser Valley Regional District. At this point I'm just going to search for the animals. And maybe we're interested in the habitat agriculture where these animals occur. Do a search. We have 20 records there. Now note here that although the area search is limited to red and yellow, red and yellow list its species and communities, we see a yellow listed one here. Now that is because it's legally designated under CERA. Let's also have a look at these modifiers we have here on the provincial ranks. So we have a B here. Now this stands for breeding population, but if we don't know that we can click on the blue button and then link over to this nature surf site. I won't do that now, but any of the interesting modifiers you see are all explained by this site. You can see too that we have map known locations for some species here and not others. Now if I scroll down here, we see this log. If I click on here, we can see that some or all known locations for this community are confidential and cannot be displayed on public maps. So if you need to know more about the pericard and falcon, for example, you can contact the CDC data at gov.bc.ca and you may be allowed information about those known locations if you have a need to know. Now let's do one final search. I'm going to do a new search. Always best to start fresh. And this time we will do an area-based biogeoclimatic unit search. And again, I want to point out that we have different levels of searches for the various groups. So at this point, if we scroll on up and choose animals, we only have the option to search by zone. If we choose plants and ecological communities, we can search by subzone variant. Now if we do a search for bunch grass and we're only interested in the very dry hot for ecosystems, our results should show those species within bunch grass and then the ecosystems within bunch grass very dry hot. Now let's also choose red listed. Now you can see that when it comes to biogeoclimatic units at the animal level, we have bunch grass, we have it down to the zone and searchable by zone. At the plant level, we go to subzone and then at the community level, we go down to subzone variant phase. Now let's have a look at one of the ecological communities and the results. What I want to point out here is that within the BC community summary, you can find very useful information about identifying this community in the environmental summary and the vegetation summary and all the places that it may occur. Again, we have the conservation status report and mapped known locations. There's also range maps for some of these communities where they occur. And under related references, you will find the guide to site identification for the area that this community occurs within. So that's useful information for identification in the field. Spend some time looking at the other related references. There's a lot of good information there. And that concludes the overview of the BC species and ecosystems explorer application. I hope you learned a tip or two from the video. If you need help, please contact cdcdata.gov.bc.ca And remember to use the CDC iMap tool to get information about the mapped known locations of species and ecological communities at risk in BC. Thank you.