Improving Access to Project Data

The Southeast Aquatic Resource Partnership partners with several organizations throughout the Southeast U.S. to improve aquatic habitat quality and connectivity. As one of the National Fish Habitat Partnerships and through partnerships with various other state and federal organizations, they manage and help fund aquatic conservation projects in the region.

This also brings with it several responsibilities that include reporting essential project information and accomplishments to their board as well as their funders and partners. However, tracking this information in a structured way that allowed SARP to generate reports was putting an increasing burden on SARP's staff.

To help make it easier to access and manage this project tracking database, we migrated the database from a Microsoft SQL Server database on a contractor-hosted server that was virtually inaccessible to Postgresql within Amazon Web Services.

As part of the migration, we worked to streamline the database structure and reports, to make it as easy as possible for SARP staff to enter and maintain key project information and generate reports. This should help ease the burden on SARP's staff, and empower SARP to more readily prepare the necessary reports for their board, funders, and partners.

While the current budget did not permit building a user-facing application that makes working with this database easier, we did make several improvements that will make that application easier to implement once resources are available.