USING ARCGIS ONLINE (AGOL) TO GREATLY IMPROVE THE DOCUMENTATION OF PALEONTOLOGICAL RESOURCES

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is tasked with managing paleontological resources, both in the field and after their collection. An important aspect of this is maintaining data related to paleontological localities, however there presently is no national data standard or system. As part of the reporting requirements, permittees are to provide a completed locality form and a map at 24k scale or higher resolution for each locality. The information on the paper forms is then translated into a BLM state-specific system, with many potentials for error in data entry, such as: transcription errors when filling out forms from field notes; carelessness of plotting maps, or not including maps with enough resolution; and errors of BLM staff in trying to translate locality forms into our own systems. Clearly, this situation is ripe for improvement.

In anticipation of a coming national BLM solution through a program called RAPTOR, the MT/DKs BLM developed a prototype application built on AGOL, Collector, and Survey123. This prototype will be tested during the 2019 field season by recruited researchers and a contractor. A web map was developed that includes a feature service to collect data from four Survey123 forms. The four forms are: 1) Locality Information (basic information about the locality); 2) Locality Visit (information about the specific visit to the locality, since they can be visited multiple times over multiple years); 3) Locality Documents (to capture photographs or other documentation); and 4) Areas Surveyed (to record where the crews surveyed for localities, including where they didn’t find localities). Utilizing mobile technology, the permittees will be able to record their new localities in the field, recording the required data through form interaction, and push that data directly to the BLM feature service on the fly.

This new process frees up the users’ time by having the most labor-intensive part of their required reporting finished when they leave the field. And BLM gets reliable data without the need to enter it manually. The prototype will greatly inform our needs for developing the fully national system in RAPTOR. Design of the paleontology portion of RAPTOR is anticipated to begin in the fall of 2019, with locality modules being developed sometime after that, so the summer 2019 data collection provides an excellent test case.