NZ Biodiversity Recording Network gets major overhaul

[Dave Houston]

This from the Dec NZBRN Newsletter (http://www.nzbrn.org.nz/includes/200912NZBRN_newsletter02.pdf)

What’s new at NZBRN?
NZBRN is a free web-based system to record and map your natural history observations of New Zealand birds, plants, invertebrates, fungi, lizards, frogs and mammals, both native and naturalised species.  It’s available on the internet at www.nzbrn.org.nz, and designed for amateur and professional naturalists who want to share and archive their observations of nature.

As of December 2009, NZBRN now contains 53,626 bird observations, 267,943 plants, 50,623 fungi, and almost 500 observations of butterflies, frogs and lizards, and mammals.

Google maps is here
Our chief web developer, Mark Fuglestad, has been hard at work this year switching NZBRN from its slow and buggy (and ugly) old maps into Google Maps. Now that the switch is made, it will be easier to add new and elegant mapping options to NZBRN.

One login to rule them all
The early version of NZBRN had a separate login and password for each type of organism. This meant that if you’d logged in to record some bird observations, you’d have to log in again to record
your plant observations from the same trip. Our early users told us that this was annoying and so we’ve changed it. You can now log in from the home page and access all portals.

As before, you won’t need a password to explore all of the amazing observations inside NZBRN. That’s all publicly available.

The same places everywhere
As part of this house cleaning, Mark also made it possible for new sites entered in one portal to be accessible to all other portals.

A need for speed
Our top priority now is to make NZBRN faster. In this fast paced world, people don’t wait for a map to load. We’re aware that NZBRN can still be annoyingly slow at times. Watch out for what we hope will be a substantial increase in speed and reliability early in 2010.

Check it out at www.nzbrn.org.nz