The Amphibian Report Card is an educational and collaborative tool to support amphibian conservation efforts in the United States. The purpose of the tool is to raise awareness of the decline of amphibians and the ecological trends driving these animals’ decline, while suggesting actions that can be taken to protect them. The Amphibian Report Card is designed to serve as a user-friendly platform that educators and the public can rely on to access information about amphibians, major threats to these creatures, and opportunities to contribute to conservation.
This project was initiated by the Emerging Wildlife Conservation Leaders program, an international training and mentoring initiative that brings together environmental professionals for capacity building and training in campaign development and advocacy skills, in partnership with leading amphibian conservation partners.
The Amphibian Report Card team approached me to develop a website based on elaborate design layouts created by my friend and former colleague Corinn Weiler. I worked with the team to firm up technical requirements that fit the project needs onto Corinn’s designs. This is often a tricky and time-intensive way to construct a project as the technology must be made to fit the designs as opposed to styling the interface once the technology is in place and requirements fulfilled.
We went with the WordPress platform because I felt it offered a good mix of scalability and ease of use. Since the designs were so complete, I chose to build the site using the LC Blank Theme, eventually switching to the Orao theme also by Live Composer. Using Live Composer page builder with blank themes gave me the necessary flexibility to build a site that perfectly matched Corinn’s designs.
The Amphibian Report Card project had two unique challenges. First, the public website needed to display Report Cards in a stylized manner that are visually appealing and easily accessible to a variety of audiences. The report cards needed to be templatized, easy to publish, and as automated as possible. I used Advanced Custom Fields to create a default post template. I then implemented an interesting CSS fix from this support forum to automate which image displays based on the author’s drop-down menu selection. This way all report cards will have the same look and feel, while allowing authors to post in a fairly easy and straightforward way.
The second challenge was to make sure that Amphibian Experts could be recruited to join the project. Experts are then presented a form to submit data about endangered amphibians in a predetermined manner that allows for consistent grading. We added user role management to the site so that experts can register and, with admin approval, join the project. We then setup Gravity Forms to power a multi-page questionnaire, including “save and continue” capabilities. Login redirects and custom welcome pages help to funnel editors and experts to those activities they are most likely to perform.
Experts also have the ability to comment on posts if logged in, allowing for discussion on each published report card. This allows for disagreement, discussion and updating as new factors come to light affecting species and the threats they face.
General public can subscribe to receive notifications when new report cards are published on the site.
The site also uses WordFence with Easy SSL for security and Updraft Plus for backups.
In the future the team has ideas for automating the data collection process by possibly integrating Gravity Forms and Google Sheets via Zapier which would save time by allowing for pre-determined formulas in the spreadsheet to aid in grading the threats to each species. Another possible future addition would be more advanced notification triggers to help notify experts when their data is published on the site.
This website ended up being more plugin-heavy than I like due to the variety of requirements but I’m very happy with the final look and feel. I think that the functionality correctly addresses all the requirements from the project team. It was a pleasure to work on this project and kept me learning. I look forward to seeing this project take off!
