Most conservation data are spatial in nature, requiring geospatial mapping and analysis. Most conservation organizations lack the time and resources to build these types of applications, although they desperately need them. We responded to this problem by building a generic solution so that other organizations will be able to replicate our efforts in just a fraction of time. Swavesey, is an online database engine that allows users to create their own spatial and relational database of any kind of object, from pictures to tabular data to textual information, and perform relational and spatial queries with them. With Swavesey for example, it is possible to retrieve information on all species of a given taxonomic group, whose range overlap with a custom shape, with a country border or with the range of another species. Swavesey will make it extremely simple for any organization to have their own spatial and relational database engine able to upload, share, process, visualize and interpret any form of spatial data.
The first organization in using Swavesey is the IUCN which will take advantage of Swavesey’s functionality to map and classify spatial databases of threats to biodiversity and associate them to species thereby facilitating species Red Listing and the prioritization of conservation efforts to mitigate these threats.
