Flora von Mittelschwaben

For almost 20 years, Mr. Winter collected data on a wide range of plants around the Wertach river and the Augsburg Western Woods Nature Park. He recorded all of it in Excel spreadsheets and shared them with others in that form. As more people contributed, the data, split into areas, years, and species, grew alarmingly fast.

For his mapping, Mr. Winter used a format he designed himself, which stored both the year of a find and the map inside the Excel sheet. The spreadsheets lived in a separate folder structure on his computer. On top of that, summary sheets listed every species by hand, both for the whole region and for individual quadrants.

On the new site, Mr. Winter no longer has to maintain or enter anything by hand. Visitors no longer have to download and search through files either. They reach the data they want through an interactive map and an intuitive search. Mr. Winter can work in the CMS directly or upload Excel files, which the system recognizes and uses to fill in new entries automatically. Data import and export both run through simple interfaces in the CMS.

The map used across many pages is a custom build on Leaflet and OpenStreetMap. A custom Leaflet plugin draws quadrants in the Gauss-Krüger coordinate system and colors each one by the state of its data. Clicking a quadrant uses Leaflet's zoom logic to zoom in and reveal further quadrants, which you can click again until you reach your target.

Instead of editing five different Excel lists in four different folders on a USB stick by hand, Mr. Winter can now create an entry in the CMS dashboard or import one from an Excel spreadsheet. Overview lists are available for download too, generated automatically from the existing data. An hours-long manual process has become a simpler system that saves time and leaves more room for research.