We are proud to announce we recently partnered with the Western Governors’ Association (WGA) to develop and implement the West-wide Crucial Habitat Assessment Tool (CHAT) for 16 states.
The online mapping tool was unveiled yesterday during a press conference at the WGA Winter Meeting in Las Vegas attended by U.S. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell and governors from the 16 states.
The CHAT is a cooperative effort to provide public leaders, private citizens and industry decision-makers a high-level overview of crucial habitats across the West. Crucial habitats are places that are likely to provide the natural resources important to aquatic and terrestrial wildlife, including species of concern, as well as hunting and fishing species.
AppGeo was selected by the WGA to design, develop, and host the application. The design process was collaborative, and the resulting application is robust, intuitive, and extensible. To meet the high design, performance, and scalability requirements, the application was developed using a hybrid of geospatial technologies, including Boundless (formerly OpenGeo, a leading provider of enterprise-grade, open source geospatial software), Esri, and Google. AppGeo was assisted by GreenInfo Network in designing the CHAT site.
The CHAT helps users in the pre-planning of energy corridors and transmission routes, or in comparing fish and wildlife habitat, by establishing a common starting point across the West for the intersection of development and wildlife. The tool is designed to enable industry to reduce time, costs, conflicts and surprises – and inform conservation groups – while helping state agencies ensure wildlife values are better incorporated into land use decision-making.
“We congratulate the WGA on their vision for a regional habitat viewer,” said AppGeo Project Manager Kate Hickey. “We are proud to have helped the WGA bring their vision to life on this important project.”
AppGeo is a value-driven, full-service geospatial IT consulting firm with a mission to empower our clients to effectively solve problems and create shared value by smartly applying geospatial IT technologies. AppGeo is a Google and Esri business partner.
For further information, please see the WGA press release.
