For information and links to the Invasive Alien Plant
Program, please visit the IAPP application page.
Overview of the Major Enhancements to IAPP Version 1.6
Welcome to the Bigger and Better IAPP
Our sixth enhancement since the IAPP application was launched in 2005.
COMING TO A COMPUTER NEAR YOU IN THE FALL OF 2008!
In order to address the needs of the wide variety of agencies involved in invasive plant management across British Columbia, the main focus of this release is:
- to allow members of the general public to report invasive plant occurrences using the new Report-A-Weed tool,
- to introduce a variety of professional reporting capabilities for all agencies based on their activities,
- to streamline your experience through a number of timesaving and intuitive improvements in both the Data Entry and Map Display modules, and
- to strengthen data integrity of the IAPP database to protect the long-term reliability of the information and to ensure it is useful to all parties participating in IAPP.
The IAPP application consists of two main modules: the Data Entry module used for entering, editing and examining the program's data; and the Map Display module used for examining the program's data spatially. This webpage addresses the enhancements and updates for both modules.
DATA ENTRY MODULE ENHANCEMENTS:
Site must have at least one Invasive Plant survey
View screen for images
Retain last Search results
Add Regional Weed Committees to Agency Administrative Areas module
Display agency administrative areas for a site
Autofill BEC information
Capture user feedback
Miscellaneous Data Entry changes
MAP DISPLAY MODULE ENHANCEMENTS:
DATA ENTRY MODULE ENHANCEMENTS:
The public is encouraged to participate in the Invasive Alien Plant Program by reporting suspected new occurrences of invasive plants via the new Report-a-Weed tool accessible on the IAPP Map Display webpage. This tool will collect the pertinent information and deliver it to the appropriate person(s) or agencies for review and follow-up.
The screens for creating a Report-A-Weed submission employ a 'wizard' approach that steps you through three easy steps:
- First, specify the location of the invasive plant simply by clicking on the plant’s location with the new Mark-Up tool, or by entering the co-ordinates manually (in UTM or latitude and longitude). If you are not sure whether you have identified the correct invasive plant, we supply a link to UBC's E-Flora database search page:
- The second screen lets you enter information about the invasive plant found at the site and other details that enable the reviewer to process the submission:
- The final screen lets you confirm the entered information. If there is an error or omission, you may navigate to the previous screen:
- A Thank You screen will let you know the submission has been successfully sent to a reviewer. If you contribute an email address you will be kept informed of the Report-A-Weed submission status as it makes its way through the process.
The Home page has been modified to include a number of new items:
In addition to the current menu items, you will find a new Reports item in the menu bar (visible from anywhere within the application), as well as a new Reports section on the home page.
Either of these menus will let you create a variety of formatted and printable reports.
Reports serve a different purpose than extracts. Extracts, which are delivered in Excel format, are valuable in creating lists and may be edited and used for a number of planning or other reasons.
Reports, on the other hand, are not editable and may be used for purpose of reporting to ministry executives, boards of directors / general managers of regional districts, weed committees, etc. They can only be run by agency Program Managers and/or Biological Agent managers and are delivered ready for printing in a pre-formatted PDF file.
Currently, the following five reports are available:
Inventory Summary Report:
The primary purpose of this report is to facilitate the reporting of year-end IAPP results, and provides a summary of which invasive plant species were inventoried by a particular agency over a particular time period and, optionally, within a particular administrative area.
The Inventory Summary criteria selection screen below allows you to create an Inventory Summary Report, based on the criteria provided.
This report tool allows the Program Manager of any IAPP agency to print a report that represents a number of details (species, area, etc) regarding the invasive plant surveys conducted by his/her agency during any given time period.
Its criteria selection screen is similar to that of the Inventory Summary screen above.
The purpose of the Treatment Summary is to facilitate the reporting of year-end and comparative overviews across multiple years of IAPP treatment activities.
The purpose is not to report on treatment results, but rather just the treatment activity itself.
The report will provide a summary of which invasive plant species were treated by a particular agency over a particular time period and optionally within a particular administrative area.
The primary purpose of this report is to facilitate the annual reporting of details on treatments by their activity type.
 When coupled with the Treatment Summary report above, these two reports will give a complete picture of treatment activities.
This report will also provide a level of auditing; specifically, for Pesticide Management Plan (PMP) reporting, since it will provide some details on the use of herbicide and herbicide totals. For integrity and security reasons, please remember that this report can only be run by an agency’s Program Manager, and is restricted to his or her agency’s data.
The purpose of this report is to assist in tracking the success of biological control across the province. The lasting establishment of biological agents is the key indicator of a treatment’s success, and this report will summarize how successful biological treatments have been on those treatment sites that have been monitored over the reporting period.
The screen below allows you to create a Biological Control Monitoring Summary Report:
The purpose for invasive plant sites in IAPP is to record the existence of invasive plants rather than their absence. When a site is surveyed, and one or more invasive plants are present, they are recorded as such.
It is of course possible that at some point after such a positive inventory, an invasive plant may be eradicated by chemical or mechanical treatment, or some other external influence; however, before a “Not Found” survey can be created for any plant, a positive inventory must already exist.
The site entry process has been streamlined to make data entry correlate more closely to the paper form that is filled out in the field, and the creation of a new site now includes the addition of a plant. Any additional invasive plants can be added to the site using the existing process.
The Add Site process now employs a more intuitive 'wizard' approach that steps you through the various stages of adding a site:
- To identify the site location, step 1 requires only the UTM Zone, Easting and Northing. If preferred, you may enter the latitude and longitude instead, but they must be entered as decimal degrees:
- Step 2 lets you enter details about the site itself. Please note the following improvements:
In response to an often-voiced request by a variety of users, we have added the field District Lot Number. This number is the unique identifier for a parcel of private land, and providing the ability to record this number with an Invasive Plant Site will provide a means to reference the lot and its metadata, including ownership, in external systems. Since a district lot number can be freely accessed by members of the public this is not considered sensitive material under FOIPPA and does not need to be masked.
Responding to yet another user request, all biogeoclimatic information will now be auto-filled by the system! Zone, subzone, phase and variant will be derived from the current official BEC tables (see also: Autofill BEC information). If known, you may enter the optional site series.
It will be possible to override the BEC information if you feel it is incorrect; in that case, a checkbox will indicate that you have overridden the system-populated data.
The jurisdiction field is now mandatory. The jurisdiction for a site is a critical piece of information for the management of IAPP data as a whole. It provides a means to segregate sites based on the entity that is responsible for the land where the site resides.
- Step 3 includes the details of the site survey; i.e. the date you were there, your agency, employer (optional) and paper file id.
Note that the Surveyors lookup is now integrated in this screen for faster data entry!
- This step lets you enter information about an invasive plant found at the site and can be repeated if more than one invasive plant was found.
If you want to enter additional plants, simply click the Add Another Species button. Note how this eliminates the need for re-entering the survey data that was already entered in step 3!
- The final step delivers an overview of all the data you have entered in the 4-step wizard process and you can simply click Finish if you are satisfied all data is correct.
  
Simply click the View link, which will open the new View Image screen:
Search results allow you to navigate directly to a record within the results list, but if you then wish to visit another record from those search results, the search has to be re-run.
In response to many users' suggestions, we have implemented functionality that lets you retain your last search results so that you can return there and efficiently view the details for some of the other results within the search results list.
The search results will be part of the Breadcrumb trail at the top of your page. The following are examples of what the breadcrumb might be following a search:
- Home > Monitoring Search > Site (114I041-200007) > Biological Treatments
- Home > Treatment Search > Site (114I041-200007) > Chemical Treatments
- Home > Site Search > Site (114I041-200007) > Site Details
To return to your search results, simply click the Search link in the breadcrumb trail.
Many users, such as Ministries and Regional Districts, are already able to filter data based on their own administrative boundaries using the Within Agency Administrative Area module.
The growing number of regional weed committees that are currently housing their data in IAPP would also benefit from being able to spatially select data that resides within their own administrative area. Therefore, a Weed Committee option has been added to the current set of Administrative Area items in the drop-down list of all the extract screens where this WAAA module is available. This will enable any user to filter data based on the administrative boundary for each weed committee.
It is often useful to know which administrative area a site resides in. Agencies may need to know this information for planning purposes. It can also assist you with simply giving some context to a site.
For example, you may already know that a particular site resides in a certain Forest District; however, it may also be useful to know that the site resides in a particular park or regional district as well.
A link has been added to the Site Details view screen, next to the Map link at the top of the page, to provide information to identify all the agency administrative areas that the site resides within:
In invasive plant management, when trying to do research or planning, it is useful if not crucial to have information available regarding a site’s biogeoclimatic data.
We are very excited about the new IAPP functionality that now automatically calculates a site's BEC zone, sub-zone, variant and phase. A function has been added to calculate this information whenever sites are added or moved.
In addition, BEC information for all existing sites has also been calculated and added.
It will be possible to override the BEC information if you feel it is incorrect; in that case, a checkbox will indicate that you have overridden the system-populated data.
Use of the IAPP application is now widespread, and with its diverse use it became apparent that a method to capture user feedback was desirable.
Users often have constructive suggestions for improvements that can contribute to the ongoing enhancement of the IAPP application.
A simple user feedback entry form has been added to the IAPP Data Entry application to accommodate this need, and is available via the Enhancement Suggestions link in the Links section on the Home page (see the new Home page illustration in the Reports section).
Modify the invasive plant ‘Not Found’ behaviour
If an invasive plant has been re-surveyed and found not to exist any more on a site where it was surveyed previously, it can be flagged as not found by entering ‘0’ in the Estimated Area and un-checking the ‘Found’ box. When a plant’s most recent survey indicates it is not found, no treatments or dispersals can be added to that invasive plant.
After an invasive plant has been treated chemically or mechanically it may appear to be completely eradicated for a period of time following the treatment. However, during the next growing season, some or all of its previous infestation may return. Therefore, it would not be appropriate to record an invasive plant survey on a chemically or mechanically treated plant until the next growing season.
Some users have unchecked the “Found” box on an invasive plant survey when a very short period of time has passed since the most recent treatment (e.g. a ‘second pass’ of a chemical treatment) and germination is expected in the following year or later in the season. To make users aware this may be an erroneous use of the Found box, a warning message will appear when you attempt to enter a new survey for an invasive plant that has had a chemical or mechanical treatment applied to it within the same calendar year.
Invasive Plant Survey Type:
The field form indicates there are three types of invasive plant survey available:
- Cursory
- Operational
- Precise
These choices are now available on the Survey section of the data entry screen (see the illustration in step 4 of the Add Site with an invasive plant section)
Defining three survey levels assists Program Managers in various planning requirements - from strategic level coarse-filter assessments to detailed containment line placements. It will also assist in planning additional inventory projects (e.g. a cursory survey identifies new species in an area - the next year a precise survey is done in order to assist in developing a treatment/management strategy) and identifying the detail needed.
The level of survey also relates to the confidence in the data.
Mask Chemical Applicators
Concern has been expressed regarding the visibility of names and certificate numbers of chemical applicators. For this reason, this information will be masked, or protected from view by all except the appropriate users.
Other miscellaneous Data Entry improvements include:
- Hide the Map link on the Site Details view screen until the day following data entry, when the 24 hr Refresh feature has created a point on the map in Map Display
- Speed up the performance of the Add Batch Plan Step 1 of 5
- Add site details to the Add Batch Plan Step 2 of 5
- Add survey data columns to the Planning Extract results
MAP DISPLAY MODULE ENHANCEMENTS:
Sometimes when viewing treatment layers, only the recent treatments are of interest. This is because older treatments may no longer be applicable to the invasive plant site or you are planning treatments for an upcoming season and do not want to treat sites that have already been recently treated.
Prior to the upgrade of Map Display from IMF version 4 to IMF version 5, there was a Push Pin tool available for users to mark a location on the map. Although this Push Pin tool is no longer available in IMF 5, we will now provide a Point Mark-up tool that offers the same functionality, and will be added to the toolbar icons.
A tool that provides a means to quickly find invasive plant sites is useful for investigating how close certain sites are to each other without having to toggle back and forth between Data Entry and Map Display. Therefore, a Site Search tool has been integrated into Map Display.
The tool will accept a Site ID and will display a map centred on the corresponding site polygon with a buffer of 200 meters.
Forest and Range Tenures:
The previous Range Tenures reference layer in IAPP Map Display has been replaced with an updated set of appropriate tenure layers.
Road Atlas:
The Road Atlas layer from the Ministry of Transportation provides road name labels for major roadways in BC which can assist the map user in navigating to an IAPP site location.
When accessing Map Display via the Map links within the Data Entry module the map scale that usually results was much too closely zoomed to be useful.
The zoom function now draws a map that contains the whole site geometry buffered by 200 meters.
|
