The Okanagan Collaborative Conservation Program (OCCP) and the South Okanagan Similkameen Conservation Program (SOSCP) have relaunch of their web portal for land use and water management information.
The Okanagan Conservation Planning website (OKCP) is the “go-to point” for conservation information and resources in the Okanagan. The OKCP was launched at the OCCP’s AGM in 2010. Over the past year, land use planning and water management data has been added to the site. This past spring, partners in the OCCP and the SOSCP significantly revised the OKCP to incorporate the latest web-based applications and functions for easy access to and use of the growing quantities of online data, resources and tools that are being added to the site.
The OKCP is the result of ongoing efforts by partners in the OCCP and SOSCP to amalgamate their resources in order to better facilitate their shared goals of effectively supporting sustainable land and resource use in the Okanagan. Specifically, the OKCP is intended to:
- Support access to regional land, water, wildlife, and climate data,
- Encourage open sharing, distributing, and use of data, information, reports and maps,
- Support decision makers with local-level information,
- Build long-term land use planning and water management capacity, and
- Engage the public in accessing and understanding regional conservation information.
Highlights of the revised OKCP are a clean fresh appearance, front-page features of partners and partnered projects, new photo gallery, events, and latest news functions. The Geolive discussion-mapping tool developed by the SPICE lab at UBCO has also been updated to better facilitate partners and the public in discussing broad conservation issues in the region such as connectivity corridors between sensitive habitats. Additionally, the resource directory has been modified in order to better facilitate searching and accessing all of these tools and resources on the OKCP.
Funding for the project has been provided by Environment Canada, the Okanagan Basin Water Board, and the Real Estate Foundation of British Columbia.
