Online Access Guide for San Joaquin River

Users can preview recreational activities by mousing over recreation icons, plus read latest news about the river.

The responsive mobile version of the site provides easy search for recreational opportunities.

Choosing Activities to Browse on the Map

Users can select activities to search for and to show on the map, near them or at any location.

Parks and other points of interest are displayed in order of how close they are to a user's location.

Popups for particular parks describe these areas and a tab shows you other points of interest nearby. You can get travel directions and you can view close up oblique angle photos of most sites.

Using the access guide on a smart phone enables detailed views of individual parks.

Client: San Joaquin River Partnership

The San Joaquin river is the spine of California's southern Central Valley, flowing 300 miles from the Sierra to the San Francisco Bay. Despite major environmental challenges to the river's health, restoration efforts are making great progress in allowing anyone to enjoy fishing, hiking, camping and many other recreational activities by the river. To highlight these and provide better public information a partnership of groups working for the river asked GreenInfo to build an online access guide to using and enjoying the San Joaquin river.

The San Joaquin River Partnership consists of approximately 15 groups working on a common vision to restore a living San Joaquin River in support of a vibrant Central Valley. In order to promote public use of the San Joaquin River, they have pursued a variety of strategies, including outreach, field trips, education and other programs. To help create overall public identity for the entire San Joaquin River, the Partnership also wanted to make available to anyone a web-based recreational access finder, which GreenInfo was engaged to develop.

Data work included supporting members of the partnership in their data gathering, and transforming that information to GIS data for the mapping application.

To develop the web application, GreenInfo started with the idea of a semi-live map as the home page, with direct links to a more functional map one click in. On the home page, users can hover over icons and see where recreation is, then go to the full guide for more details and special searches. Searches can be for parks, interpretive sites, or amenities. Clicking parks on the map offers travel directions and birds-eye photo views, plus a "what's nearby" tab.

The web site also includes a blog that the Partnership can post events to. This was done through a WordPress site that is pulled into the access guide site.

The web site was developed to work on a phone, without requiring the download of a mobile application - the site senses a mobile device and reformats itself to fit that type of device. These mobile users can quickly find recreation near them, and get directions to it.

The entire site was developed using open source tools and technologies, in particular Leaflet and Javascript.

Funding for the project was provided by the National Park Service Rivers, Trails, and Conservation Assistance Program, Resources Legacy Fund, The Nature Conservancy, The San Joaquin River Parkway and Conservation Trust, and member organizations of the San Joaquin River Partnership.

Focus: Environment, Recreation, Social Justice/Equity

Services: Interactive Solutions, GIS Services, Data, Applications Development, Web Mapping, Mobile Applications

Tags: parks, recreation, rivers, San Joaquin River

Project Years: 2014

GreenInfo Network

Online Access Guide for San Joaquin River

GreenInfo Network