Where Nature Meets Technology: How a digital library is helping to conserve Oregon’s natural resources
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From its west coast to its eastern border, Oregon is 395 miles of lush forests, high desert, mountain ranges, and coastal tides. The state comprises nine distinct ecoregions, each characterized by its unique topography, climate, wildlife, vegetation, and waterways. Mild, wet winters and warm, dry summers contribute to the Willamette Valley’s fertile soil, making it the state’s agricultural hub. Separated from the valley by just one ecoregion, the East Cascades is dry and mountainous, with a volcanic history evident in buttes, craters, and lava caves. It also provides a surprisingly good habitat for aquatic wildlife, thanks to its lakes, reservoirs, and marshes.
Just as each ecoregion contains its own natural beauty, it also faces its own unique conservation issues and threats to natural resources and native species. The Willamette Valley is vulnerable to population overgrowth and increased pollution. The East Cascades is navigating invasive species, degraded wetland habitats, and disruption to historical ponderosa pine forests and oak woodlands.
To begin addressing the numerous climate and conservation issues that threaten Oregon’s natural resources, residents, policymakers, and communities are turning to data for guidance. By analyzing historical and current data and documenting trends and patterns over time, conservationists can begin to make informed decisions and develop mitigation strategies.
As one can imagine, having nine individual ecoregions generates a lot of data. Which poses the question: where to begin?
Introducing Oregon Explorer
For many residents, policymakers, and communities, the answer is Oregon Explorer, a digital library that houses Oregon’s natural resource information and supports informed decision-making at local and statewide levels. “We like to refer to it as a purposeful digital library that helps people engage and have informed conversations about the issues that affect Oregon’s communities and environment before decisions are made that affect current and future generations,” said Janine Salwasser, Oregon Explorer program lead for the Institute for Natural Resources.
Oregon Explorer is a collaboration between the Institute for Natural Resources (INR) and OSU Libraries & Press IT team. INR, located at both OSU and Portland State University, was established by the Oregon legislature in 2001. Oregon’s 2000 State of the Environment Report documented that essential data, maps, and information on natural resources were largely inaccessible, unusable, or nonexistent. The report determined that Oregon’s “existing environmental data collection and management system must be improved to effectively measure ecological conditions, trends, or risks.” INR was founded, and one of its key charges was to serve as a publicly accessible clearinghouse for natural resources information, providing tools and data to support discussion and decisions related to long-term stewardship.
As a land and sea grant-designated university with a significant amount of natural resources data and research, OSU was a natural (pun intended) collaborator. Together, they began the monumental task of collecting, curating, and sharing state resources through a publicly accessible digital platform, the Oregon Explorer. “Oregon State University Libraries & Press IT has taken the lead on the technical development of the Oregon Explorer and its web mapping tools,” said Marc Rempel, Technical Program Manager for Oregon Explorer. “This responsibility covers both the physical infrastructure — such as servers —and the software components, including databases, application frameworks, website platforms, and GIS applications.”
“It has been a unique and synergistic partnership that combines the technology, digital collection, and patron services of the library with the subject matter expertise, user network, and public agency relations of INR,” Salwasser added.
“Online maps help users better understand what is important about all places in Oregon, and how to conserve and manage natural resources in ways that strengthen local communities.”
— Janine Salwasser, Oregon Explorer Program Lead / Institute for Natural Resources
Beginning with the Willamette Basin
In 2004, INR and OSU Libraries developed their first digital exploration portal and prototype, the Willamette Basin Explorer. The portal was designed to foster an understanding of the future of the Willamette Basin under various land-use scenarios. Supporting maps, relevant research, and land use recommendations were included, providing a comprehensive overview. The Willamette Basin Explorer successfully digitized and made accessible an out-of-print hardcopy atlas originally published by OSU Press. The portal provided immediate and easy public access to the most up-to-date and accurate information about the basin, as well as multimedia stories highlighting the importance of the basin and its future.
Twenty-five years of collaboration, $7 million in grant funds, and 13 sponsored topics later, Oregon Explorer serves as the digital library of natural resources for Oregon. It delivers immediate public access to comprehensive data, stories, mapping and reporting tools, full-text documents and reports, and general information about Oregon’s natural resources. Oregon Explorer is a demand-based digital library, meaning topics are sponsored by and developed in collaboration with requesting agencies or other partners, updated or rotated for relevancy, and cover a wide range of Oregon’s conservation issues. Users can explore concerns related to water scarcity and begin identifying solutions through the Water Planning portal, or track wildfire risks using the Wildfire Risk Explorer tool.
While Oregon Explorer is primarily used by individuals and decision makers involved in and affected by natural resource use, policy, and planning, it’s also used in classrooms and for class assignments related to water science and policy, ecological restoration, rural sociology, stream ecology, aquaculture planning, land use planning, and introduction to Geographic Information Systems. “We would like to think that greater knowledge is being gained and better decisions are being made about Oregon’s natural resources and communities using the Oregon Explorer,” Salwasser said. “It might be that they are learning about the renewable energy resources in Oregon and how to better site projects that will minimize harm to wildlife species while promoting economic development in rural communities.”
Elevating Oregon Explorer
Earlier this year, OSU Libraries completed a redesign of Oregon Explorer, revamping the site and migrating it to the Environmental Systems Research Institute’s (ESRI) Hub platform. “The previous site had been up for about 10 years and was showing its age in both design and application support, having been built in Drupal 7 and hosted on library servers,” Rempel said. “The site had a lot of content that needed review and update. We chose to focus on the topics that had the most use and engagement with sponsors, and supporting mapping and reporting tools.”
The Hub platform, which is included in OSU’s ESRI license, was chosen for the redesign due to its cloud-based architecture, which provides scalability and automatic updates for security and platform enhancements. Additionally, it has an integrated connection to OSU’s ArcGIS Online spatial data and mapping system, which allows for story maps and dashboards. “Online maps help users better understand what is important about all places in Oregon, and how to conserve and manage natural resources in ways that strengthen local communities,” Salwasser said.
The ease of scalability will also make it easy to add new topics and tools as sponsors request them. It also enables the expansion of topics and tools geographically, addressing larger areas like the entire Pacific Northwest or the Pacific coast. “We know that natural resources issues, such as water planning, wildlife migrations, and climate change, do not stop at the Oregon borders,” Salwasser said. “Having an ability to present information and data for transboundary areas, such as the Columbia River Basin, will help to inform important discussions about water availability, fish passage, impacts of wildfire smoke, and other natural resource issues in bigger and better ways.”
Rempel is also looking ahead to future possibilities involving the technical side of Oregon Explorer. The redesign offers built-in flexibility to not only address changing topics, but evolving technology and user needs as well. “With the rise of AI, future directions of the Oregon Explorer site may allow users to chat with the site to surface data and tools fit to the users’ needs,” Rempel said. “Creating custom maps quickly with natural language and finding data values for a specific need quickly will all become much easier in the years to come.
“As technology and user needs evolve, ongoing engagement with our partners and users will be crucial to ensure the platform remains relevant, accessible, and impactful. We welcome feedback and look forward to expanding the site’s capabilities to meet Oregon’s future challenges.”
Check it out
We aren’t kidding when we say Oregon Explorer is a vast data resource, so here are some recommended — and interesting! — entry points to get you started:
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