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NED Mission: Improve the quality, quantity, and availability of regional data and related information on fish, wildlife & their aquatic and terrestrial habitats using a publicly supported approach to information systems management.

The Northwest Environmental Data Network (NED) researched the need for tools to help environmental and other decision makers who need data and maps to understand problems and solutions.

The ESRI Portal was chosen because of its low cost and extensive features.

This demonstration shows how the Portal works.
The USGS NBII Program has worked collaborated with NED to develop the demonstration.

Following is a demonstration showing how the NED Portal works, using the Columbia River Basin Fish & wildlife program community.
The demonstration is designed to show managers or decision makers how they can use web based tools and technology to inform decisions.
Demonstration and Quickstart topics include:

Steelhead salmon in the John Day Basin
Using the Map Viewer
Discussions about Metadata Catalog
Publishing to the NED Portal using the Community Channel Editor

For more information or explanation contact community stewards:

Kelly Lotts		Montana State University USGS National Biological Information Infrastructure Big Sky Institute
Tom O'Neil		Northwest Habitat Institute

Introduction

What is the NED Portal?
Why was the Portal Created?
Who Manages the Portal?
Who Can Use the Portal?
What is Harvesting?
Who are the Participating Partner Organizations?
What Technology Makes the Portal Work?

What is the NED Portal?

The NED Portal is a regional library of cataloged metadata records describing distributed information resources available from participating partner organizations.

Each library record contains an abstract (brief description), keywords, spatial extent of the data, time series, details about the data, and contact information. Links to external websites are provided to access the data. Data published to the Internet in standard form is available for use in the Portal's viewer along with other distributed data.

It is an easy to use Internet tool that can:

Search for data based on user defined geographic boundaries, key words, or full text (like Google).
Make custom maps by overlaying many different maps from a variety of sources.
Discover and download tables of data related to your search (e.g. in Excel).
Automatically harvest data from other locations.
Organize information in indexes and inventories so that you can easily find it.
Accept your existing metadata or use the template to enter it on-line.
Print, save or email copies of the data or maps that you create or find.
Allow others to find and use your information.

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Why was the Portal Created?

An independent regional study in 2003 found that many regional researchers, scientists, managers and members of the public can not easily locate the data needed to stay informed and make decisions. The study recommended the creation of a Regional Data Portal based on National and International standards.

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Who Manages the Portal?

The Northwest Environmental Data Network (NED), a group of Federal, State, Tribal and Non-Governmental entities is responsible for managing the Portal and the pilot installation. More information about NED can be found here. The Portal is growing, so please check back periodically to see our progress.

Day to day management of the Portal will be provided by Channel Stewards who will help to organize the content of Portal Channels (for example for Endangered Salmonid data), promote Portal use, assist those wishing to publish to the Portal, and ensure that published information meets Portal standards.

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Who Can Use the Portal?

Anyone who has access to the Internet can get information from the Portal. Anyone can publish to the NED Portal regional library via the standard portal content template after creating an account.
The NED Portal can harvest data published on the Internet in standard form.

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What is Harvesting?

Harvesting provides a way to add metadata records to the NED Portal's centralized regional library. more...

Harvesting does not crawl the Internet like web crawlers do. Harvesting allows for optimized searches of the records in our catalog. This allows for a more focused search which serves up more useful search results within our catalog.

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Who are the Participating Partner Organizations?

Participating Partner Organizations include government and non-government agencies, academic institutions, and related private sector organizations throughout the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia.

To become a particpating partner, create a new account on the NED Portal, and you will be contacted by a portal administrator.

What Technology Makes the Portal Work?

It is based on off-the-shelf technology, the Portal Toolkit from ESRI. This technology is also used by the National Geodata.gov Portal. The NED Portal will provide data to the National Portal. The benefit of a regional portal is twofold: the region can decide what data is important to it and focus on developing data resources that are not necessarily of national interest, and regional Channel Stewards can help to refine data quality to meet regional requirements, a necessary service that National Portals do not provide.

To find out more about the Portal, send feedback, or get help - click on the buttons at the top right of the Portal home page.