Government & institutional
HRE Biodiversity Portal
A geospatial portal for biodiversity, hazard and damage-assessment data in Gilgit-Baltistan.
- Role
- Software engineer — full stack, GIS integration and deployment
- Period
- 2025 — present
- Status
- Live
The problem
Environmental and disaster data in the region arrives as shapefiles on hard drives, damage performas on paper, and survey spreadsheets that never meet each other. A field team assessing flood damage records the same household twice under two spellings; an analyst wanting to see biodiversity observations against hazard zones has to open a desktop GIS and hope the projections agree. None of it is queryable, and none of it survives the staff turnover of the programme that collected it.
The approach
The portal puts the spatial data in PostGIS, publishes it through GeoServer, and renders it in the browser with OpenLayers — so the same authoritative layer serves the map, the query and the printed report. Damage assessment is modelled as structured performas (house, business, livestock, vehicle, injury, death compensation) attached to a located affectee, rather than as free-text attachments. Report templates then generate documents from those records, which is what stops the map and the paperwork from telling different stories.
What it does
Layer publishing pipeline
Uploaded spatial layers are validated against layer templates and published through GeoServer, so a new dataset becomes a live map layer without a developer in the loop.
Structured damage assessment
Affectees carry typed performas for house, business, livestock, vehicle and property damage, plus injury and death-compensation cases — each verifiable and each tied to a location.
Report generation
Report templates turn stored records and map output into finished documents, so the assessment that is filed matches the data that is held.
Administrative hierarchy
Province, district and tehsil are modelled explicitly, which is what allows the same dataset to be summarised at whichever tier is asking.
Teams, organisations and sharing
Staff, teams and partner organisations have scoped access to projects and files, with sharing recorded rather than arranged over email.
Access
HRE Biodiversity Portal is institutional software. The deployment is reachable at the link above, but the system itself is behind a sign-in and its data is not public — so this page describes the problem and the architecture, with no screenshots and no client-confidential detail.