Live Nature Wise: The People and Parks Foundation Nature Locator
The People and Parks Foundation has developed the Nature Locator to help people, no matter where they are, find, access and engage with nature through a variety of nature spaces, places, activities and events.
We have worked with Visualise Now as well as a huge number of stakeholders across local, state and national government, accessibility organisations, active recreation, emergency and health agencies, land and water assets managers, conservation, tourism, philanthropy and technology.
Those involved contributed their perspectives and ideas through multiple workshops and one-on-one meetings. Together, through a collaborative design process, we developed a ‘rapid interactive prototype’ to take to market and develop into a national, and perhaps one day, international nature discovery tool.
Image courtesy of: Alison Hill
The stakeholder co-designed prototype is now available, please Contact Us if you’d like us to walk you through a demonstration of the prototype.
Introduction
The People and Parks Foundation Nature Locator is a data-rich, interactive web-based platform that makes nature accessible like never before.
The Nature Locator is being developed as a key part of our Live Nature Wise suite of initiatives.
The Nature Locator provides detailed, accurate and up-to-date information on nature places, spaces, activities and groups across tenures. It combines data from existing sources and provides a platform for new data creation and collaboration.
The Nature Locator will:
- Facilitate people to easily find, access, learn about and actively enjoy nature and nature-based experiences, care for nature, and share their experiences connecting with and caring for nature with others.
- Enable people and organisations to have a deeper understanding and appreciation of the value of nature.
- Enable everyone to regularly connect with nature, near and afar – including connecting with themselves and with others in nature.
We will do this by designing and building a user-friendly tool, including the associated infrastructure and processes, to become the ‘go-to hub’ for nature-places and spaces, and nature-based activities and experiences.
Nature Locator Features:
- Links to nature-based groups and organisations using filtered search functionality
- Data-rich, interactive web-based platform and application, including interactive maps
- Combines existing and new data across land tenures, breaking down data silos
- Involves citizen science and community feedback
- Assists land and water asset planning, management, and reporting
The Nature Locator has Benefits for Everyone
Benefits for data partners
Land and water asset managers will gain access to enhanced federated data, including GIS mapping where relevant,
that can provide a baseline for measuring the effects of climate change, fires, floods and developments as well as conservation investments and community engagement with existing and new nature assets. The Nature Locator aims to enable unobtrusive and collaborative monitoring and reporting of an area’s biomass, fuel load, biodiversity, cultural and community values.
Benefits for the public
Nature Locator users gain unprecedented access to user-friendly information on nature-places/spaces and activities, drawn from a range of sources including other users. The Nature Locator enables people to research, plan, share, coordinate and review (without being bound by tenure) their nature-based experiences with others including:
- Holidaymakers discovering new regional places, and new ecotourism and Indigenous heritage tourism experiences they had never encountered before
- Schools finding nature-based curriculum and excursion opportunities for their students near and afar
- City dwellers finding health and wellbeing escapes and nature-restoration volunteering activities in regional areasPartnerships are key
Image courtesy of: Meredith Lamb
Partnerships are Key
Partnerships are key to the People and Parks Foundation, and to every stage of the Nature Locator’s development and implementation. We are currently engaging with a wide range of stakeholders – potential partners and social enterprise customers – in our prototype design process.
We welcome new partners to support the Nature Locator with expertise and/or funding for:
- Market research across potential user groups
- Data source research
- Social enterprise business model development
- Program management capacity
- Nature Locator promotion and distribution
Resources
Download our ‘Nature Locator Update’ April 2021