1. Carbonscapes A National Look at Soil Carbon Landscapes
H. Franklin LaFone and Maneesh Sharma

2. About the Project
The goal of USDA CarbonScapes is to provide a useful and easy to navigate web map application to educate and answer questions for stakeholders about USDA inventory, modeling, and mapping of terrestrial biosphere carbon across the landscape.
Partners
USDA NRCS
West Virginia University
WV GIS Technical Center

3. History Attempt to get all the data onto a common ‘table’
Developed by the contractor Critigen
Created by interaction with USDA stakeholders
The first attempt to make a unified tool
Technology basis
Flex based
Chosen for quick development and cross browser compatibility
Rests on SQL Server platform/CMS which contains all data

4. Limitations
All things to all people - No clear focus on audience or how it would be used
Development ended in Beta – no real user testing implemented
Complex, unintuitive interface
Little user documentation
Incredibly difficult to update/add data

5. How to Address the Issues?
Team with the experts
Conducted a series of meetings with NRCS staff
Created small focus groups - Users of varying expertise level
Technology Changes
Interface in more modern technologies – HTML 5/JavaScript
Less ‘enterprise’ level back end work
Create appropriate products for appropriate audiences
‘All things to all people’ is ambitious
Different audiences are looking for different answers – one size does not fit all

6. Entry Point

7. Atlas

8. Atlas

9. Atlas

10. Explorer

11. Explorer

12. Explorer

13. Explorer

14. Explorer

15. Data

16. Learn More

17. Future Directions Add new data pools
Critically evaluate each section – does it serve a purpose?
Make the infrastructure easier to update – CMS
Mobile development

18. Questions? Comments?