Overview

The Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife (MDIFW) conducts surveys to locate and study many species across the state. With limited resources within MDIFW it has been a challenge to keep up with the tracking and data collection involved in wildlife surveys. MDIFW has a strong relationship with the outdoors and the wildlife watcher community and has leveraged their passion and interest to help survey species in the past. The MDIFW Citizen Science Program recruits interested citizens who are skilled at identifying specific species to participate in some of their wildlife monitoring programs. On this website, citizens find descriptions of those programs and the information that the Citizen Scientists are collecting. If a citizen thinks they may be interested in participating, there are links to contact the program biologists. Citizens can also electronically submit general questions about these programs.
The Citizen Scientist portal allows citizen scientists to discover and register for citizen scientist programs and record their survey data online. Previously, Citizen Scientists had to submit their data on paper. Now, easy-to-use citizen scientist data collection forms make it seamless for citizens to enter the data from their surveys and view them in context with other citizen scientist–collected data. The portal provides real-time mapping and visualization and allows the volunteers to track their time and mileage for MDIFW federal reporting.

The intent is for this application to encourage citizen engagement and generate more interest in the outdoors and wildlife, the Department, and the Citizen Science programs available.

The main features of this app are:

• Role-based portal for approved citizen scientists to contribute to multiple programs
• Map-based search, filter, and data visualization
• Intuitive user interface targeting the public, citizen scientists, and MDIFW biologists
• ArcGIS Server and ArcGIS Online integration