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this is the harvest habitat and conservation webinar on automating habitat game and inventory programs presented by app geo applied geographics and we are ready to start i'd like to make you all aware that this webinar is actually part of a larger webinar series you can see all of our upcoming events as well as past events and recordings at appgio.com events we have a handful more scheduled for the remainder of 2020 and we encourage all of you to head over to that page and check them out if you find this one interesting there is a whole lot more that we're doing as part of this program just to introduce appgio who we are as a company we've been around for coming up on 30 years now supporting the public sector as well as the private sector and all things geospatial we like to consider ourselves subject matter experts in applying geospatial technology for problem solving and all sorts and we have decades of experience working with wildlife organizations specifically environmental type projects are at the core of our business and one of our longest lasting focus areas so this is a topic that many in the company are very passionate about and excited to present to you today with that i'd like to quickly run through today's agenda you can see on the right hand side of the screen there that we have an audience today that spans from the east coast all the way to the west and a whole lot in between so i want to thank all of you again for making time in your busy schedules to attend we're going to start off today with some background and a high level overview of the program from there we'll be discussing a bit more about the business rules and workflows in the prior approach then we'll introduce some of the new workflows and enhancements that are at the core of this initiative we'll wrap it up with a summary and some closing thoughts and then have plenty of time to get to all of your excellent questions at the end and to introduce myself really quickly aaron ducett here i'll be the mc for today's presentation here we have the rest of presenters so we've put together an all-star cast for today's presentation and i'll offer up some quick introductions before we get started bill johnson is a rock star in the gis community many of you may know bill from your professional careers or time attending conferences uh remember those but for those who haven't he spent uh over 35 years in the world of gis and normally this time of year he'd be out on his world tour instead lucky for you we've got him on our call today and he's excited to speak to all of you caitlin another gis pro she's been deeply involved in both the texas park and wildlife and the nevada department of wildlife applications and she's been an analyst here at fgo for over three years now and last but not least jackie davis is a project manager extraordinaire here at fgo and a austin texas local one of my favorite project managers here at appgio so you're all lucky to get to hear from her today and with that i would like to hand it over to bill to kick off the presentation well good afternoon everybody and we're pleased to have you all here to hear this story about how we've automated uh some of these uh wildlife and conservation practices i'm gonna gonna go through an example of an application we built for the texas parks and wildlife department and i want to give you a little background here because the situation in texas is in some ways a bit unique but i want you to bear in mind the the kind of the high level benefits that you're going to hear about here because even though the particulars are probably going to differ from your use case i think you ought to be able to see the connection with how these levels of workflow automation might benefit you so first of all deer hunting in texas is a very big deal it's not only part of the the long-standing heritage of being a texan but more importantly or perhaps at least as importantly is it generates an estimated two billion dollars a year in economic activity and this is just whitetail deer hunting alone and a lot of that is from attracting out-of-state hunters now texas is a bit different than many other states in that most of texas an estimated 95 percent of the state is privately owned they're very very few uh federal or state lands open to hunting unlike a lot of the western states in this country and therefore all of the activity around managing a deer herd both from a habitat standpoint and and a deer herd health and uh sustainability perspective requires cooperation of private landowners and so this program that we're going to talk about has been around for about 20 years in the state of texas and basically uh what they do is to entice landowners to open their lands for hunting and to um implement habitat improvement plans that uh are the key to the state having a uh a quality deer herd that will attract out-of-state hunters is that they the incentive for these landowners is that they offer more liberal hunting seasons and additional deer hunting tags and so the wildlife biologists at the texas parks and wildlife department have for many years been involved in working one-on-one with these landowners to calculate uh what would be a reasonable additional number of deer tags to be able to issue to a landowner that is joining the program and agreeing to make specific habitat improvements and um this uh this program uh i want to get into in a moment but let's let's advance to the next slide i want to introduce you to a couple of texans here uh the the two gentlemen you see the one in the upper left is alan kane alan kane is the one with that incredible 12 point buck and that is the kind of deer that i see that every time i see this photo i'm just in in awe that animal that is the kind of deer that attracts out of state hunters and and makes texas a destination for premium whitetail deer hunting allen is the manager of this program uh that involves landowner cooperation and oversees the team of wildlife biologists and in the center and on the right is a gentleman on his team named chris cerny both of these gentlemen are native texans both of them as you can see are committed outdoorsmen and believe very strongly in the mission of their organization and in wildlife conservation uh let's uh let's go ahead to the next slide here now this uh this slide i'm gonna i'm going to leave this up for for a few minutes here and explain it because there's actually a very interesting story told in this graph the timeline going left to right is is a 20-year span from when the program started up through 2016 and i'm going to have a later one showing the more recent years on here but let me just explain the background so the going left to right is the years and the height of these bars indicates the total number of landowners that are participating in the program now you see there's actually three different colors on these bars but you don't need to fuss with that those have to do with some subtle differences in the program just pay attention to the total height of the bar now the program began in 1998 initially they had about 800 landowners that signed up to participate and again the enticement is they're agreeing to implement habitat improvement plans on their lands and they're going to get additional deer hunting tags and longer seasons to use those tags and what we see is the program uh in the first few years grew at a modest rate and in the mid 2000s you see uh starting in 2008 the state went from an entirely paper-bound process that is the landowners were were having to uh request the forms sent to them to fill out to enroll in the program and all that and what happened in the mid 2000s is the state launched a website and made this information available to to begin the registration process online and that as you can see resulted in 2008 and beyond there was some growth in the program because that introduced some efficiencies it went from being a totally paper-bound process to one that was at least partially automated at least the front-end part of the enrollment uh could be done um through through some online automation and so as the program grew unfortunately the size of the team at tpwd managing this program did not grow there were 10 wildlife biologists on the team in 1998 and there are still 10 wildlife biologists on the team today and as the process of enrolling became easier at least the front end part was easier the back end part that is the part that these wildlife biologists would do to evaluate these lands and determine uh what sort of a habitat improvement plan was needed on the land to result in a in a high quality deer herd and then to determine how many additional deer tags to estimate that work uh saw no automation and so what you see in this graph is that as we get up into the 2000 teens 2014 2015 that begins to level off and and really at 2016 it's no no additional growth in the program and the reason is is that the wildlife biologists at this point were completely maxed out they in fact just could not uh keep up with the demand and so there was there was no further growth in the program now that's why uh the team led by alan kane had this idea that perhaps we could use gis to begin to automate some of this back end work to come up with these habitat improvement plans and estimate the number of deer tags so let's take a look at some of that gis data first of all they had already a gis layer of these deer management units if you're working in another state i'm sure you have something similar so each of these deer management units um is uh that's an active process to uh keep track of the herd in these units on top of that they had and uh jackie if you could advance thank you this is a a habitat layer of um ecological zones and uh and vegetation types and uh this is a very sophisticated layer compiled from remote sensing data and soils data and some other inputs to create very detailed uh ecological zones which was then overlaid on the uh deer management units so that they had dominant ecological types associated with each deer management unit that's the first leap in use of gis here on top of that then they can track uh jackie if you could advance yes thank you so then uh the harvest ratios you know what's reported uh for takes in these areas and can and this is what wildlife biologists do compute the carrying capacity and and so forth of that land uh down at the deer management unit level which then can be represented um here in a in a spreadsheet but what basically this all of this data the historic deer population data the habitat data the uh and the harvest data would allow the wildlife biologist to be able to use gis and point anywhere on the map in the state of texas and be able to see what are the habitat types there and and so there are certain habitat improvement programs that you align just to different habitat types and also uh based on all this deer census data be able to determine number of tags and so that is the magic of gis that's at the back end of this process and so what happened as a result of this automation is that we have a new process where the entire program is done online a landowner registers online and when they when they when they enter their land parcel that land parcel is now a new polygon in gis that is overlaid on all those data layers i just showed you and so the the system can make immediately a recommendation to the landowner on on appropriate habitat improvements and also determine the number of gear tags and issue those deer tags all online in fact that the landowner prints out the deer tags themselves and so we went from a process that required a lot of one-on-one work by the wildlife biologist to a process that is completely hands off and what did that do well if you see that the bars for the subsequent years the system went live in 2017 and um and you can see that suddenly they're seeing growth again in the program and this is super important uh outcome for the state of texas because what's happening around the country is access to hunting lands is generally declining the number of people participating in hunting is declining and here in texas they're actually moving in the opposite direction they're they've now got more lands than ever open to hunting and preserving that uh two billion dollar a year uh economic activity around hunting so it's been a a very very important uh benefit to the program uh jackie if you could advance so again the texas case may be a little bit unique but what what i want you to be thinking about is how this process of automating a function uh has freed up these wildlife biologists these wildlife biologists are are now able to focus on bigger picture issues and doing the back end work of managing this program uh in in the larger sense and then dealing with landowners only on an exception basis or in the most complex situations and being able to really return to you know the work that they're they that they do best and um and the secret to all of this is really in what we call the business rules when this project started with with texas parks and wildlife they estimated that they had probably about a dozen business rules but as we as we got into this and as jackie is going to explain to you uh when she goes into a lot more detail about the program the uh the result is that teasing these business rules out of the heads of the biologists so they could be coded into this application it turns out there are there are more than 150 specific rules most of which had you know had not been documented and that's typical of many of these programs the sophistication is in the heads of the staff and and the part of the part of what has to happen to build these levels of automation is to extract that out of the heads of the of these professionals and encode that it has business rules really conditional statements in an application all right i'm gonna at this point turn it over to jackie who's going to give you a lot more detail about just exactly how this application was built for texas jackie thanks bill um hi everyone as it was mentioned before i'm jackie a project manager at appgio based in austin i am also the project manager working on the texas parks and wildlife application for close to two years now um working alongside caitlyn and some great developers on this i'm going to talk about specifics on how the texas parks and wildlife land management assistance application works um highlight the new features and services we've been working on and after all of that i'll hand off the mic to caitlin to talk about another really exciting wildlife project that we have just started working on but we're going to focus on texas still for now um just as a note to everyone before we start there are a few acronyms that i may throw out there and i just want to do a quick review but obviously please ask any questions into the questions box if i say them too quickly or you're not sure what i'm talking about so the easy one is tpwd stands for texas parks and wildlife department lma is the land management assistance application which is the main application that we are talking about here the system that we've created and the app which again is lma is the system by which we want landowners to register for the various deer programs that parks and wildlife has to offer which are both the mldp program which is the managed lines to your program and some other programs that i'll talk about as well so as bill mentioned this application is built with the intention to foster and support management and stewardship of native wildlife habitats on private lands in texas and deer harvest is a really important part of that habitat management and conservation so as bill said we kind of rewind to the beginning when we first started looking into all the business rules that were involved in this application there were multiple on-site off-site and online interviews and sessions with tpwd folks and you first start off with you know the this handful of rules and you think oh that's that's going to be manageable but as the interviews progressed um everything got a lot more complicated a lot quicker and we realized that for every user role there were multiple interactions with the site and i think we're with the new enhancements we've done this year we have to be close to like 300 different business roles within the the system um but without getting too deep into the rules they can get pretty complicated because they involve you know seasons start and end dates reporting dates user roles uh where land might intersect with certain species boundaries and things like that but these are just some of the considerations we had to think about before we started building this application so we have all these rules and our challenge was to make this complicated process an easy one to use and an easy to use interface for biologists who were extremely burdened make it easy for landowners to entice them into the program administrators law enforcement managers anyone who's interacting with this application so that everyone can work more efficiently together and we wanted to transform this painful process for tpwd into something that's easy to use that holds the user's hands throughout the process with simple user interface and intuitive design because that's the only way that we could see the lma program advancing and reaching more customers so you know before i move on i want you to think about your organization and all the pieces of knowledge that you have that are potentially the exception to the rule you might have them documented you might not they may just be in your head but you know how can you be sure that everyone is following the same process for those rules or those exceptions every single time if that's not an issue you have in your department maybe also think about do you find yourself doing too much paperwork or busy work but somehow it's still not enough to provide and satisfy whatever program you have implemented there are always ways to improve efficiency that benefit your organization and ultimately allow biologists to be biologists freeing up time to do more of what you guys love whether that's field work or anything else so that was the position we found ourselves in trying to help tpwd resolve and we just hope to show you guys how we were able to clear it up for them um in order to get everybody focused not on just you know maintaining the conservation program but actually being able to advance it so as bill mentioned we have the old workflow really dumbed down it was just the landowner registers their property this was all done by snail mail the biologist visits maybe evaluates the property provides some recommendations and the landowners either mailed the tags or has to go to the tpwd office to pick up their tags this was you know barely manageable when they had about three million acres and 800 sites in the early 2000s but as bill showed the program has grown to over 28 million acres registered and close to like 18 000 sites or something like that and tpwd has barely changed their staff numbers to accommodate this and i'm sure a lot of you can relate to similar workload struggles um so the new workflow which is again very much dumbed down i'm going to show some more detail into this but the new workflow is the landowner is able to register their property online the application is able to calculate the number of deer tags that have to be assigned and then the application after there's some approvals and checks allows the landowner to print their tags at home which is just easy and convenient for everyone so here is the new workflow demo shown in about a 67-60 second gif this is from the landowner perspective but biologists land managers pretty much most users are able to do this the entire process to register your property in the system has gone from weeks to minutes i'm you can see it happen entirely in this 60-second gif but um i want to point out that this interface has been completely overhauled in the last year or so to be more user friendly it's more streamlined with the progress bar at the top it has simple buttons and all the pop-ups guiding your interactions um and so using either satellite or the default map imagery you can draw or upload your property boundary or your properties boundaries um the workflow will then ask if the user wishes to register their property as part of an aggregate or a cooperative as bill mentioned in texas you can have multiple properties team up together to get more tags and in doing so you can split the profits from the combined tag count as a business so if you recall from the previous slides with all the business logic we had mapped up that's now distilled down to these pop-ups that you see showing up over here so if a user says yes then take them down this path to register their property if a user says no to this specific thing then finish their property creation process and submit it for review once you've done all that you get this nice little pop-up saying you did it congrats you've registered your property would you like to be contacted by a biologist and this is also a key piece of functionality that we added that both increases biologists efficacy because they not only reach out to those who actually want assistance but it also gives the property owner more autonomy in this process um so all the pop-ups you see used to have to be you know phone calls emails and now it's just a simple pop-up telling the user like hey don't forget to do this in order to qualify for the tags that you really want so the next slide we're now switching into the enrolling in the harvest or conservation options workflow so you have your property in the system but if i were a landowner the next thing i'd want to do is to actually enroll in the deer program either the conservation option or the harvest options so that i can get my longer hunting season and potentially more tags um so what the user does is they go to that nice big green button and they click it and they are now on the manage land deer program enrollment page so once you register your property you can enroll into the options view the calculation of total tags that your site might get and all the excel calculations that biologists used to have to do manually are queried on the back end of the system within seconds uh it saves so much time for everybody involved and it's great and then you have this legal language that the user has to accept in order to be able to get their gear tags if your property is you know not viable for the program you would end up getting a text notification and email explaining why and who to contact if you want to contest these calculations and the same process is applied to the conservation option enrollment there's slightly different business rules for a conservation option because conservation requires that you work with a biologist whereas the harvest option is more of a do-it-yourself kind of workflow but hopefully you guys have the gist and that a landowner is able to complete an application quickly and easily um as i keep mentioning this program is all about longevity and conserving texas wildlife flora and fauna for years to come um and that is pretty intricately tied with the hunting practices uh these options and these workflows are not just in place to help with tpwd's workflow but to systematically ensure and check that people are committed to conservation stewardship and that they're rewarded for that behavior with longer hunting seasons and more tags so in texas a lot of landowners sell their tags for profit so the more tags or hunting permits means more earning potential for the landowner therefore making them want to participate in more habitat and conservation practices every year so you get this really nice loop of harvest and habitat conservation promoted by the financial gain for the landowner that the tags and the permits can provide moving away from the landowner process how is this app benefiting biologists benefiting administrators and such one issue that tpwd faced was difficulty in standardizing the reporting for review and ultimately for funding now that the application has been in place for a few years it has a lot of data collected and refined and we are able to make whatever reports parks and wildlife need pretty quickly and seeing how this is how they report to the state their metrics which is part of how they receive funding anything that expedites this reporting process is a huge help and all of this is dummy data but i just wanted to show you that whatever data is put into the application we can query it and generate a report that is useful to your organization so now we are looking at some brand new enhancements as of this year this is the bulk recommendation demo so while you're entranced by the new gif which you should be because it is awesome i would like to introduce you all to the bulk recommendation demo this year we expanded the species that are tracked on the site to include pronghorn bucks as well as the antlerless mule deer and this workflow shows how a biologist is able to log into the site see exactly which properties they need to provide recommendations for review all the information they need like where the hair where the herd boundaries are in relation to the property which is where you see those blue various blue and red shadings there on the side um what acreage the property has and be able to see a system calculated number of permits which obviously standardized throughout the whole application so it would be the same for all biologists and the biologist is able to make a recommendation based on that so i know it doesn't look you know like a super crazy insane enhancement but not only does it save biologists supervisors and administrators so much time because a lot of this used to be done in excel or just wasn't done before it fits in so seamlessly with the existing ui and that's just awesome to me most of the ui and the design workflow is thanks to the really close work we've been doing with chris cerny at tpwd um he's been an awesome resource and we are just really proud of the ultimate um the ultimate look and everything of this bulk recommendation and the other workflows that feed into this so yeah so what has implementing all of these new workflows actually done for tpwd as bill mentioned it's encouraged landowners to participate more in conservation practices all of it to ensure that texas can keep hunting for the foreseeable future keep their hunting traditions alive as well as ensure that the texas wildlife are thriving and in turn the parks and wildlife department can keep up with the demand that it's experiencing but looking ahead and always looking ahead with the goal of increasing the customer base increasing stewardship and conservation we're always wondering what we can do and obviously there's always ways of improving the design of the application for all users there have consistently been talks about expanding to even more species which is what we did this year i'm still holding out for alligator expansion but we'll see and as of last year and i think as we mentioned earlier on in the presentation because the program popularity has increased at a pretty exponential rate even though there has hasn't been really an increase in staff capacity since i think like the early 2000s um and to make sure the program can continue to grow starting in 2021 tpwd will have the ability to start implementing a fee to enroll in its programs so since texas parks and wildlife is able to you know report accurately on the amazing amount of work they're doing and the work the biologists have had to take on year after year tpwd has proved to show how much they need to hire more staff and to ensure the quality provided by texas parks and wildlife remains top tier which hopefully is exactly what this fee will allow them to do so now i know that deer harvest is an important aspect of habitat management and conservation for texas but that's not the case everywhere also texas tends to be unique in how much private land there is uh for the parks and wildlife department to handle uh so now i want to hand it off to my amazing colleague caitlin who will talk about a very different application in a different state that was able to use a lot of the lessons and logic applied to the lma application in a very different way with less of a focus on harvesting thanks jackie so as jackie mentioned earlier uh we're currently working with the nevada department of wildlife or endow to develop their partners and conservation database so while the goal of wildlife and habitat conservation is the same in each of these projects and finding ways to automate things or make it more efficient how this is managed and approached in nevada is a bit different from texas and that there's a much greater emphasis on partnerships with other public agencies versus the public-private partnerships that's really driving those efforts in texas so just to give a bit of background endow currently manages around 600 habitat improvement projects which equates to around 27 million acres annually this includes implementing and funding new projects as well as monitoring and managing existing ones the goals and sizes of these projects can also differ widely so for example some may be a few acres focused on invasive species control or improving habitat for a specific species while others could be several thousand acres and maybe something like fire rehabilitation projects are focused on aerial seeding excuse me uh endow oversees these projects through a defined project life cycle so in addition to the on-the-ground field work that biologists do to implement these projects other project work includes planning submitting and reviewing applications managing and tracking funding accounts as well as reporting some of these projects are managed exclusively by endow but more often this is done through coordination with external public and private partners so implementing and tracking all these projects is by no means easy and endow currently manages this through an access database and is transitioning to a web-based application to better integrate all these aspects of the project life cycle and communication and reporting um into as well as incorporating spatial geospatial and tabular data sets currently the geospatial data is a bit disconnected from projects in the database users may have this information stored somewhere locally on a shared drive but is unable to be represented well so as these projects grow not only in number but also in complexity this will be important to track and maintain additionally as is complexity and amount increases the amount of time staff have to enter data about them or perform other necessary project related tasks like submitting invoices uh or entering other data will go down so because of that it's really important for us to provide and now a solution that facilitates data entry and it's very simple and intuitive and easy to use like lma so with all that in mind our overarching goal is really to let biologists be biologists and not burden them with complex or time-consuming workflows just to enter data about a project our goal is to integrate that data effort or data entry effort into a defined project life cycle so this information easily entered as the project progresses without taking too much time away from the actual project implementation we also want to better integrate spatial data not only for tracking purposes but also to allow biologists to perform spatial analysis to gain better insight into potential project strengths or weaknesses at a planning stage so they can make more informed decisions and a better insight into what's going on into an area they're looking to work in and finally we want to improve communication and reporting among internal and external users as well as the general public through this work we hope that this will allow biologists to plan and implement projects that are biologically productive financially efficient and easily reported upon through an information system that is again easy to use and provide scientific value through its use and fits how and when biologists do their work um so that was a very quick overview of what we're doing for and now are there any questions on this or the lma application all righty well um aaron here again we are moving on to the question answer session thank you so much caitlyn and feel free to submit questions this time on any of the topics discussed we have plenty of time here to get through all of them and we look forward to seeing what you come up with see if you can stump the experts here got our first couple questions coming in the first looks like it might be about the texas application what are some of the property and environmental attributes that biologists can determine remotely without conducting a field visit what information is available to them online i can take that one so sometimes you know there it will necessitate a biologist going out there but um it's a lot of it is user reported um information as well as i think you can add in images and files to kind of prove your claim so that's how that's how users are able to put in information about what they're doing you know whether it's like burning practices or anything like that this is bill let me just add a little bit to that so if you remember the slides we showed earlier there's uh a series of gis layers including a a vegetation layer that has ecological units soils data behind it and then all of the uh the deer uh population information and harvest information uh is by deer management unit so what's what's actually happening is that the wildlife biologists were actually the landowner using this online system is is entering a land parcel that is then overlaid against those things and so the um the uh attributes of the property are assumed to be for that ecological unit that the uh that the land boundary intersects and the harvest recommendations come from the calculations done at the deer management unit level so the the it's a it's a function of the size of the parcel and the characteristics of the deer management unit that the parcel lands in excellent and just oh sorry go ahead uh well just to add on to that for endow biologists will have access to some of this data at a planning stage they'll be able to look at a map view and essentially overlay data like soils precipitation vegetation data elevations look at slope and aspect just all that stuff just to help provide them some more information without having to go out into the field or open it up in desktop gists great i think those are all very helpful answers we have many more questions coming in trying to keep up with all them here but we'll keep it going on the road um next question um are the user submitted polygons verified against real property data i guess like an authoritative data source for the land boundaries how is that accounted for yeah so there is a check in the user submitted property polygons process where if your property ends up intersecting with someone else's reported property boundary it is kind of flagged you are sent an email saying your property is submitted but it needs to be reviewed and that is when a biologist is able to go in and discern what's going on and potentially look into records to see whether they are misreporting their boundaries and let me just add a little bit to that i know depending on what state you're in a number of states have uh a seamless parcel boundary layer that's available as a gis map layer in texas they are in the process of compiling that information now most of the data exists at the county level and they're in the process of gathering that information up and creating a statewide layer so that's perhaps a future enhancement to actually have the the parcel boundary layer visible in the application but it's not it's not available in there at this time all right next question i actually have coming in a couple different times i'm going to try to combine it here it is about the dashboarding and how many tags to allocate for each given property is that calculated just by area um and what is the underlying software doing the calculations jackie can you yeah i was going to say you you you answered that when you were talking about the different layers and how that that factors into the calculations right yeah so yeah if there's a if there's a more specific question there uh perhaps the the questionnaire can uh can add to that sure i'll move on to a couple others here's one specifically about the endow application does the endow tool have auto functions such as a monthly summary report being able to summarize funding sources acres locations of work so maybe if you could touch on any reporting tools that are built in caitlyn yeah for sure um so there will be some reporting functions very similar to what jackie demoed um in lma so users will be able to log in um and then create reports based on their user role and kind of customize uh to what specifically they're looking for there will also be a public kind of dashboard landing page that will sum the total uh funding amount and acreage based off project phase so if it's planned completed or ongoing those totals will show for each specific phase to public users if they just go to the site all right there's a little bit of a follow-on to that i think on the project management side what is the long-term maintenance on this project can the can the keys be handed over once the project is completed or does it require um ongoing subscriptions and support it kind of depends in some ways um so from a back end database perspective there will be some things that you know we can hand over and you know maintain lookup tables and things like that um others that require more like technical front-end coding um might be a bit more ongoing support yeah and if i can add to that with a tpwd um we are constantly adding enhancements so it's but if we weren't doing that um then we would work with their i.t department to make sure that they're able to handle the majority of of issues that might arise that we don't really expect anything to or handle the database and if there's any further front-end enhancements needed if your it department is able to handle that that'd be great if not we are always available to help with those enhancements exactly and appgio is definitely there to be the super power backup for your existing i.t infrastructure we do quite a bit with cloud technology which i believe both of these applications are running in a cloud format next question just coming in for the partners in conservation database do you anticipate that this would eventually supplant whatever existing system is used to manage the financial side of the projects or is the new application not meant for that level of detail such as specific grant numbers and what has been spent from a grant so i guess if you could summarize a little bit about the more the financial side and the financial tracking how that is handled yeah for sure so um some of it they still will have to work through state finance systems to try and reconcile so there's some reporting that needs to go on there in terms of you know what the state says they've spent versus what endow is saying they've spent so there's not like a total replacement um but you know they will be able to look at this within the application and say you know for this funding source we've spent this much amount uh break that out there's a sum total or project by project very good here's another question was a lot of training required to get staff up and going on this new software so for texas parks and wildlife yes there was um a lot of training that had to happen i think there are training videos available for the landowners um but the i think chris does pretty regular trainings with his team every time we have new enhancements come out just to make sure that everybody is able to transition but again we hope that with the intuitive design that it's it's pretty self-explanatory um but yes there is kind of ongoing training always going on to make sure that everybody's using the system correctly cool um moving on to a couple more here thanks again for all these questions coming in we do have another 10 minutes left in the session if anything comes to mind or you want more detail feel free to ask if there's anything um you wanted to take offline if you make mention of that in your question we can follow up with you directly at the conclusion of the webinar i'll also make a quick note that the recording of today's session will be distributed for everyone who signed up so here just getting the last couple that i see now um regarding the texas program other than a faster process are there any specific benefits for landowners has revenue increased um we wouldn't be able to track the revenue that the landowners are receiving from you know getting longer hunting seasons and and more tags and such um i think we can just infer based off of the fact that texas is has such a booming hunting industry that is maintaining and growing pretty much every year let me just add to that so it's in addition to the faster process i think the real the real benefit is that it enabled a lot more land owners to register in the program and enroll in the program you know it it had plateaued because there was just not enough capacity for the wildlife biologists to keep up with the demand on it and so they they were landowners not able to participate that wanted to and so yes it's a faster process but it also allows the program to grow and i think that's that's the big picture benefit yeah i think that's a great message just not getting caught up in the capacity issue and making it more about uh efficiency there then last one i'm seeing here in these times of food insecurity in the face of the ongoing pandemic is there any data or observations on the relative importance of hunting and fishing as a source of food interesting and that is an interesting question i i certainly don't have any any uh any anything other than you know educate a guest on that i i doubt that any of our folks on our team do either but jackie have you heard anything from the tpw i have not but that is a really awesome question and it's something that i'll i'll follow up with them on um yeah that's not something we can answer but it kind of leads into the bring food initiative that fgo has going on with food banks but that's that's separate from parks and wildlife since you mentioned that jackie and we have a couple minutes i'm just gonna take the ball and run with it on that one a little bit so yeah the bring food initiative is something that appgeo has done in response to the pandemic basically to support food pantries uh to be able to deliver food more efficiently and in many of these pantries they're operated by volunteers and they operate on shoestring budgets and during the pandemic with the huge number of people vulnerable people that are shut in and can't get out to get food the pantries are seeing unprecedented demand and and needing to do many more deliveries and so the application that we we built and we're offering it for free to all these non-profit food pantries basically uh takes their delivery location lists and uses gis to geo code those uh does clustering to find the the delivery sites that are near each other and then for that cluster puts them in the most efficient routing in other words takes the driver and and directs them the most efficient path to each of the uh sites in that particular cluster so they can they can take the request for food and hand hand these optimized delivery routes to the drivers to much more efficiently distribute the food from these food pantries so this is an application we're very we're very proud of the fact that we've been able to create something like this and contribute it to the to support these volunteer food pantries in accomplishing their missions in this very difficult time absolutely thanks for that rundown bill we do have a recording of a very recent webinar we put together on that initiative and some more information on our website for those who are curious um it looks like we have gotten through all of our questions i think if anyone needs um the contact information if it's on the next slide you can put it up there real quick but with that i'd like to thank personally all of our presenters and attendees especially those who had questions again you can contact jackie or bill here with any further questions and we look forward to having you all in our next presentation