With BioBase, we continue to make the process of creating aquatic maps faster and better and deliver data to practitioners that will make them better at their craft. A better lake manager, means better outcomes for clients/stakeholders and conservation. Here, we focus on our new Polygon Edit feature.
We’ve improved the process of creating polygons on user maps that allows them to analyze sections of a map and extract important information for research and management. The polygon feature is one of our most popular features used over a thousand times a year by BioBase users to calculate water volumes for herbicide treatments, dredge areas, sizing aeration systems, quantifying fish aggregations, etc.
First, for new comers to BioBase, review the basics of the polygon feature in the EcoSound User Manual found on our Support Resources page or watch a quick how to video.
Polygon Edit Feature
In the past, if you made a mistake or wanted to make any kind of adjustment to an existing polygon, you would have to create a new polygon from scratch. Now, you can edit any pre-existing polygon or polygon template (Figure 1).
Polygons are saved as “templates” per waterbody, these templates are similar to “cookie cutters.” When you map, you are essentially rolling out dough. The polygon template is like the cookie cutter being pressed into the dough to make a cookie. The metaphorical cookie is all the statistics about that area of interest including, size, water volume, aquatic vegetation or fish abundance. You can use these cookie cutters over and over again. The Polygon Edit feature allows you to mold the shape of the cookie cutter. And want to know another cool thing the polygon edit feature does? It keeps the original in case you ever want to go back. Because sometimes, you make a mistake trying to fix a mistake!
Processing Improvements
In the past, polygon statistics would be calculated on the fly with the browser going back to the BioBase database and fetching statistics and essentially baking the cookie. This worked great for small cookies, not big ones. As users have used the tool for bigger and bigger areas of bigger waterbodies, we needed more processing power than any browser could deliver. As such, we’ve move polygon statistic calculation from the browser to our more beefy cloud processing (Figure 2). This reduces the numbers of errors and browser timeouts users were experiencing with the old process.
What we can’t do in real-time, we do more reliably in the cloud with powerful servers and we’re communicating with you every step of the way. We’ve enhanced user visibility into their processing queue through the My Account menu (Figure 3). Like trip/merge processing, users will receive an email when their polygon has finished processing and statistics are available.
Watch this space for other exciting Polygon tool enhancements and integrations!
