Washington Park Arboretum Interactive Collections Map
- How to use the map
- How to add a shortcut to your phone homescreen
- Use the Trail Map to find gardens and taxonomic collections.
What's in the Map
The interactive map contains the location and associated data of the Living Collection, or curated trees and shrubs, growing in the Arboretum. The data comes from the BG-Base database that stores information about plant names, individual specimens, where the specimen originally came from and data on associated Hyde Herbarium voucher sheets. The location of the plants and many other objects such as trails, benches and ponds were mapped on paper starting in the 1980's. In 2013 and 2014 the collection data and paper map data were integrated into a georeferenced database that forms the basis of the interactive map. The data at this time is largely based on historic paper map grids and may not reflect current conditions. Search the Living Collections database for current information. Please give your feedback, corrections and suggestions to Tracy Mehlin.
How to Read an Accession Number
807-76*B (Pinus bungeana) was the 807th plant accessioned (added to the collection and recorded in the database) in 1976 and is the "B" individual specimen. One accession may have many individual specimens associated with it: *A, *B, *D, *E (specimen *C may have died or was deaccessioned because of a curatorial decision. )
Data, Map Layers and REST services
The data for the Washington Park Arboretum Interactive Collections Map is stored in an ArcGIS geodatabase and published to an ArcGIS Server. Researchers and students may access all of our data and layers from the server in a variety of formats. The layers may be used with ESRI ArcMap, Google Earth, or various online map formats hosted by ESRI. This allows researchers to integrate the data into their own work. For example, researchers may add layers from the interactive map into their own ArcMap documents, to perform their own analyses with more advanced tools. Another version of the map is available with more tools for measuring distance, drawing on the map and turning all the layers on or off.
This sharing of data is made possible by the REST Services API provided by ArcGIS Server. It provides a standard interface, which allows data to be consumed by a variety of online or desktop resources. Researchers may browse the primary set of data at: uwbgmaps.sefs.washington.edu/arcgis/rest/services/PublicFeatures/MapServer//. From there advanced researchers may use standard JSON or SOAP interfaces to work with the data, or perform queries on individual layers. There are also links to open all the layers in ArcGIS Online, Google Earth, and ArcMap.
For access to data in a spreadsheet format, our Living Collections Database web page allows users to enter search terms and see the results of queries in a table. You may also retrieve data for all the plants in the collection using the link to the Entire Database of Taxa by Scientific Name. This will download a CSV file, which should open in Excel on most computers. This data includes plant scientific name, family, common name, UWBG accession number, and grid map location. Threatened plant locations have been suppressed from the public data. Researchers should inquire to Raymond Larson for specific information about those plants.
Blog Posts about the Mapping Project
IMLS grant funds geo-referenced, integrated database
In the Arboretum with the total station and other milestones
How would you use an interactive map in the Arboretum?
Where in the Arboretum? New interactive map answers that question
Arboretum Map Upgraded for Smartphones
Credits
This map was made possible by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Professors Sarah Reichard and Soo-Young Kim were co-Primary Investigators on the grant.
The following people contributed to the project: David Campbell, Andrew Fraser, Keith Ferguson, Ryan Garrison, Wendy Gibble, Fred Hoyt, John Kirby, Ray Larson, Jim Lutz, Tracy Mehlin, Katie Murphy, Matt Norton, Kathleen Delos Reyes, Eve Rickenbaker, Kaitlyn Schwendt, Chris Watson, David Zuckerman plus numerous volunteers. In 2015 SpatialDev redesigned the map to work with mobile devices.
Specimen photographs by Cindy Clark and Tonya Ricks.