Sites

What are locations and sites?

Sites (eg. nature reserves) are polygons stored on the BRC warehouse and accessible to us on Nature Counts websites in various ways. They are useful for recording against, for example if you have been to a site and want to enter a list of records for those sites, when you're entering your records you can use the site polygon on Nature Counts to quickly get to the same location. They are also useful for filtering records and building species lists for particular sites, see the exploring records help page for more info. They can be used to set up Activities for certain locations.

Types of sites

Personal recording sites ('My sites')
Nature reserves - the boundaries of Trust nature reserves
Project sites - boundaries of sites that may not be Trust reserves but the Trust does work with them on this.
Plots - used for survey grids etc.

On the enter a casual record and enter a list of records pages, nature reserves and project sites appear as suggestions in the location input:

Viewing project sites and nature reserves

You can view project sites and nature reserves on separate pages which can be found on the Surveys menu.

The nature reserves sites are located at ../sites/nature_reserves

The project sites are located at ../sites/project

The pages are identical in function except that they show the 2 different types. Below shows the nature reserves page for Sheffield and Rotherham Wildlife Trust.

On the left-hand side we have a map of the reserves and the right hand side has a list of sites. Clicking on the edit button in each row takes you to a page to edit a site. If you click on 'Site name' at the top of the table you can organise sites alphabetically.

The create new location takes you to a page whether you can add a location by drawing a simply polygon. This is good if you quickly want to add a site and aren't too worried about the accuracy of the site.

The import new location(s) from shapefile button takes you to a page where you can upload a shapefile (which may contain multiple individual sites). This is good if you've got lots of sites ready to go

Finding the site pages in the main menu

Screenshot of SRWT's nature reserve pages

Editing or adding a location manually

Clicking on create new location or clicking on edit in the actions column takes you to the page where you can edit the location:

Provide this information about your site:

Site name: the name of the site

Comment: some extra information about the site (non-essential)

Map ref: A grid ref or lat/long coordinate roughly representing the centre of the site, you can generate this by clicking on a point in the map or typing it in manually

First, click on the map somewhere for the centre of the site.

Then, click on this icon to draw a polygon:

Then draw your shape, double click to finish the shape. If you are unhappy with your shape you can just start drawing a replacement shape and it will ask you if you want to replace your old shape with your new shape.

Message that will pop up if you draw a new polygon over the old one.

When you're happy with your shape. Then press 'Submit'

Adding a new location(s) by importing a shapefile

You can add sites from shapefiles. These shapefiles can contain multiple sites. Please ensure that you now the projection (eg. OSGB) before uploading shapefiles.

To upload the shapefiles they must be in a zip folder with the files (with file extensions such as .sph .dbf .cpg .prj .shx) inside the folder. For example:

Then go to ../locations_shp_importer/import or by clicking on the 'Import new location(s) from shapefile' button or from 'survey home'.

You'll be met with this page. Choose your zip file.

You are then met with this page:

Complete the following details:

Projection: your GIS person should know this. Your options are:

OSGB easting/northing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordnance_Survey_National_Grid
WGS84 (GPS Lat Long) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Geodetic_System

Name attribute: this will give you a dropdown of different attributes pulled from uploaded shapefile, hopefully one of these refers to the name of the site. Select the one that refers to the site name.

Code attribute: This is a non-essetial peice of information. Again this will give you a dropdown of different attributes pulled from uploaded shapefile. If one of your attributes refer to a site code then select an appropriate attribute, otherwise ignore this.

Behaviour for existing locations with same name and code:

This refers to what should do if the uploader encounters a site already on Nature Counts with the same name and code. The options are:

Ignore the new location. Select this if your shp file upload has multiple site boundaries, and the duplicate site is not a replacement.
Update the existing location with the imported location boundary. Select this if the duplicate site boundary is an update to an existing site.
Always treat the imported location as new, giving it a unique name. Select this if the site boundary is a duplicate, but you wish to keep it as separate/unique to the original - not recommended.

Behaviour for multiple polygons with same name and code in imported data:

Combine to make a single location (option 2 in diagram).
Create separate locations with unique names (option 1 in diagram).

Location type:

The main ones you'll want to use are Project Site and Wildlife Trust Reserve

Note: the types of locations that are available here are an option that can be configured if logged in as the admin account here

The press 'Create locations' You'll know that the import has been successful because this message will appear at the top listing all the new sites that have been imported:

Adding survey grid squares / plots

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