Development of the DECIDE Tool is guided by an ongoing co-design process between the community of biological recorders using the Tool and the project team.
The features and functionality of the DECIDE Tool will be developed during the project. This page provides an insight into the development of the tool and the changes the project have made in response to feedback from recorders. These updates don’t include every tiny change that we’ve made but capture the main updates to the tool. We also include a roadmap section highlighting the features we are actively working on.
You can find the current tool version number under the DECIDE logo on the app menu. The software version numbering we use comprises three numbers. The first number is the major version number, and so would indicate substantial changes or milestones in the DECIDE tool. The second number is the minor version number which indicates medium size changes. The third number indicates a ‘patch’ which are small changes. Some changes may not actually be visible to you as users of the DECIDE tool and so we refer to these changes as ‘back-end’ changes. We give each version a name of a species that is active at the time of year conciding with the version release.
We hope that you have ideas on how the Tool could progress and improve, so please:
- Give us your feedback using the orange button in the Tool.
- Join the mailing list to be kept informed of the latest developments and to receive invitations to participate in occasional short polls and surveys.
Version notes
Version 1.1.0 - June 14th 2023
A minor release to add a product walkthrough to the app.
Version 1.0.1 – 16th June 2022
A maintenance release to address a few minor problems with version 1.0.1. The release also included one very minor new feature - a 'copy link' feature on the suggestion pop-up (to the right of the share buttons). Clicking this link copies a link to the clipboard that will open the app with the currently selected suggestion displayed. Another noticable change is that the Greenspace access layer is no longer shown by default.
Version 1.0.0 – 17th May 2022
A major release ready for the butterfly and moth recording season for 2022 with improvements to the DECIDE dataflow and DECIDE Recorder Tool user experience.
Changes to the DECIDE recording priority:
- The DECIDE recording priority dataflow has been improved so that it is updated nightly based on (verified and unverified) records, submitted to iRecord, iSpot and iNaturalist. Significant ‘behind the scenes’ updates to make this happen.
- The DECIDE recording priority and predicted species richness is now seasonally-dependant so that the models and data reflects species that are predicted to be active in each month. A non-seasonal ‘all year’ option is also available to users.
The suggestion pop-up has been redesigned to more clearly inform users about the recording priority in each location. This includes:
- Displaying a headline recording priority of this area.
- An analysis of the two DECIDE recording components; model uncertainty and how recently a record was recorded in that area.
- The ability to share this information via a variety of platforms such as twitter, Facebook and email.
- Quick links to directions via Google maps and explore OS map of the area.
Improvements to the map user experience including:
- Options to show the OS grid square at different resolutions (monad/tetrad/hectad etc.).
- Satellite imagery is now included as a base map option.
- Text search to navigate to a particular location on map.
General tool updates:
- The tool can now be added to a home screen on a mobile device as a progressive web application.
- The help pages have been updated and reorganised to be more intuitive to users.
- There is a webpage for signing up to the DECIDE personalised newsletter.
Version 0.4.0 "Dotted Border" - 25th February 2022
- Users can control the maximum number of suggestions generated with a new input in the right-hand panel.
- Users can click anywhere within the generated DECIDE recording priority circle to add a pin and open a pop-up which provides information about the location.
- The text in the pop-up has been changed to describe the recording priority of the location relative to the DECIDE recording priority circle.
- Dynamic URLs with parameters for latitude, longitude and whether to load suggestions and/or pop-ups have been set up so that we can generate a link that will take the user to a specified location.
- The threshold control input in the right-hand panel is hidden when the fog map is in use because it is not applicable to the fog map.
Version 0.3.5 "Pale Brindled Beauty" - 17th January 2022
- Improved and faster suggestion generation process. Suggestions are now generated within 100 m of accessible features, rather than 200 m which was used in version 0.3.4. See the accompanying blog post for more details.
- Bodies of water such as rivers and lakes now appear as the lowest recording priority and suggestions will no longer be placed within these bodies of water.
- The information articles are now hosted separately on WordPress. A dynamic list of WordPress blog posts can now be found in the Tool to link to each of the blog posts.
- The create account / log-in functionality has been removed from the Tool as we are no longer developing this any further. We will instead be implementing personalisation through email newsletters.
- Habitat classification descriptions have been updated to be more user-friendly.
- Grid references have been added to the information for each suggestion pin.
Version 0.3.4 "Chestnut" - 1st November 2021
- Updated the DECIDE Tool to feature the new DECIDE logo.
Version 0.3.3 "Yellow-line Quaker" - 6th October 2021
- Back-end changes to how the DECIDE recording priority layer is generated which helps the development team develop features such as the fog map.
Version 0.3.2 "Frosted Orange" - 24th September 2021
- Changed the orange pin marker representing suggestions introduced in version 0.3.0 to a blue pin and surrounding blurred circle. This was prompted by feedback that the pin suggested a very precise location whereas the introduction of the surrounding circle highlighted how the suggestion indicates an area of high recording priority.
- A new button was added to manually ‘get suggestions’ rather than the automatically generating suggestions.
- Added a ‘home’ button at the top of the map page that takes the user back to the introduction page.
Version 0.3.1 "Painted Lady" - 12th August 2021
- Fixes small bugs introduced in version 0.3.0 of the tool, most particularly about the map projection of the DECIDE recording priority layer.
Version 0.3.0 "Burnished Brass" - 11th August 2021
Version 0.3.0 saw some significant upgrades to the DECIDE tool making the tool more user friendly and adding new ways to interact with the tool through pins and pop-ups. The following changes were made:
- Introduction of a 'Recording Suggestions' feature: provides pins on the map and pop-ups providing contextual information on these locations. These are placed in areas of high recording priority, and dependent on data availability, were located near accessible features such as footpaths.
- Improvements to visualisation based on feedback from users, specifically changing the DECIDE recording priority layer to be a smoothed surface rather than a 100x100m grid to help people focus on general areas not grid squares.
- The method of calculating recording priority changed so that the SDM uncertainty measure used was the mean standard deviation of uncertainty across species.
- Changes were made to the colour scaling of the DECIDE recording priority layer to prevent ‘hotspots’ from occurring with very high recording priority which then meant that the rest of the area was all low priority.
- Improved trimming of the DECIDE recording priority layer near coastlines so the edges of the layer followed the coast more accurately.
- Additional map base layers were added.
- A new way of visualising the DECIDE recording priority layer was added as an option for recorders to use. This layer, known as the ‘fog map’, aims to highlight areas where the records are most needed whilst using ‘fog’ to obscure the areas where recording is of lower priority.
Version 0.2.0 "Marbled White" - 16th July 2021
The first version of the web application that was accessible to the public. The following changes were made:
- Improvements to visualisation based on input from the focus group.
- Terms and privacy notice completed.
- Recording priority was changed to be calculated from species distribution model (SDM) uncertainty and recency of records.
Version 0.1.0 - June 2021
This was the initial version of the DECIDE Tool web application. This version contains only enough functionality to demonstrate some of the project concepts and provide a focus for discussion and further development. Recording priority was calculated with a combination of species distribution model (SDM) uncertainty and species presence.
Road map
Here we have included some information about what the project team is currently working on, and some known issues that we are actively working on. If you have any feedback on these ideas then please use the feedback form which can be found by clicking on the orange ‘Give feedback’ button.
New features and changes in development
Features to be worked on post version 1.0.0 have yet to be decided.
Known issues
- Certain habitats like saltmarsh and rivers have a very high recording priority however we would not expect there to be many butterfly or moth species in areas like this.
- The number of species predicted by the model in each grid square is often greater than a recorder would likely expect to see.