SiteCensus, step by step

Choose your state

SiteCensus opens on a map of Australia. Queensland and New South Wales are live, each built for its own legislation and datasets. Commonwealth matters come with every version: the nine Matters of National Environmental Significance under the EPBC Act are screened wherever the site is.

There are two ways in. Explore is for looking around, with nothing committed. Assess a site is the job that ends in a report. This page starts with Assess.

Set the study area

Search an address or a lot on plan, draw the boundary, drop a point, or upload your own (zipped shapefile, KML, KMZ or GeoJSON). An address finds the lot and puts its cadastral boundary on the map: here, Lot 531 on WD4057.

A 500 m buffer catches what sits nearby. The site and the buffer stay separate the whole way through, so you can see what sits on the site itself and what is only nearby.

Choose what to check

Turn on a single layer, a whole category or everything. The defaults are sensible, only what is switched on gets queried, and the run button says how many layers that is. For this site everything is on: 459 layers.

Focus masks everything outside the study area and its buffer, so the map shows the site rather than the whole coast.

Run it

Every layer is queried live against the custodian's own service: 502 layers from seven services, most of them the Queensland Government's. What comes back is what the custodian publishes today, checked against your boundary and your buffer. This run took 120 seconds.

The rating, and each matter

The result is a constraint rating: High, Moderate, Low or Minimal, and the panel says what set it. Here it is High for three reasons, any one of them enough on its own: 6 matters carrying a statutory referral or approval trigger sit on the site, an Endangered regional ecosystem is mapped and an EPBC-listed threatened species is confirmed in WildNet records.

Expanded, every matter is listed with its result: present, screened and clear, not assessed, or not screenable here. A nil result is a statement about the data, not a clearance.

Records onto the map, and export

Any finding opens to its records, and a record drops onto the map so you can see how close it sits. Here, the one Australian painted-snipe record, from August 1985: endangered under the EPBC Act and the Nature Conservation Act, and located to within 1.8 km.

Each matter downloads its intersecting features as GeoJSON.

The report

A few questions about the project, such as the development type and the approval pathway, decide which sections print and how some findings are worded. They never change what was screened. Add your name, your client, your logo and a job number. Anything left unstated, the report says so rather than assuming.

The report takes about a minute to build. Every matter is written up one by one: what was found, what was screened and came back clean, and what can't be answered from a desktop, with who holds the answer. There is no AI in it: each section follows fixed rules from what the run found.

It opens with how it was built, then the rating with the counts behind it and the rule that set it, so the rating can be checked rather than taken on trust. Here: 30 matters present, 6 statutory triggers on the site, 10 more in the buffer only, 31 screened and clear.

The report's map shows the ecological layers that carry a statutory trigger and intersect the site, clipped to the study area, with a legend, a scale and a locality map. Save the report as a PDF or export it to Word.

The Print Composer

For a fuller map than the report's, the Print Composer lays out a sheet from the map on screen. Pick one of five templates, tick what goes on the sheet (legend, scale bar, north arrow, locality inset and more), choose A4 or A3, portrait or landscape, and add your logo and accent colour. The preview updates as you go.

The finished sheet carries the scale, datum, date, who prepared it, the client and the data sources. Save it as a PDF or a PNG.

Saved to your projects

Save the project to your BioGeo account: the study area, the layers you had on and the results. Open it again later from this browser or any other device.

The map workspace

Explore is the same data with no study area needed and nothing committed. The library holds every layer the app can draw, grouped by category, by what each one legally implies, or by the service it comes from, and you can search it. Each layer is drawn live from the custodian's service when you switch it on.

Most layers only draw once you're zoomed in, so start by going to the site.

Layers in close

Switch them on one at a time: essential habitat, category B remnant vegetation, the protected plants trigger map, then WildNet's wildlife records. Close in, the records separate into one point per occurrence.

Each layer's symbology, labels, opacity and drawing order are yours to change. The attribute table is the custodian's published data: open the watercourses and each one carries its stream order. The Nerang River is fifth order.

Your own data, and any map service

Drag a zipped shapefile, KML, KMZ or GeoJSON onto the panel and it draws with everything else, as context or as your area of interest. Put Queensland imagery underneath.

If what you need isn't in the library, connect an ArcGIS server and take the layers you want. The Queensland, Commonwealth, New South Wales and Geoscience Australia servers are listed ready, or you can paste another address. Added layers are for reference: they draw on the map but stay out of the assessment and the report.

Then and now

The imagery menu goes back in time: Queensland's historical aerial photography from 1930, every release of Esri's world imagery since 2014, and satellite land cover and surface water from 1988. Pick a year, then drag the divider between then and now.

Map tools

Map tools holds the rest: measure a distance or an area, read coordinates, draw an elevation profile along a line, add hillshade, mask outside the site, or swipe between two sets of layers. Global species records from GBIF can go on the map too, kept separate from the assessment.

Print a map

Whatever you've built in Explore prints through the same Print Composer, with the same templates.

Back to Assess

An area drawn in Explore carries across. Choose Assess this area and it becomes the study area in Assess.