With the window user experience (UX), things started to progress quite quickly.
I made a lot of progress with Forage Outlook. Mapping availability to geography wasn’t too hard, it sounded harder than it actually was.
The data used was from well-established, authoritative sources, such as the Royal Horticultural Society, Plantlife, the Woodland Trust, the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, Forestry/Forest Research material and other UK habitat and plant references.
But the challenge was always going to come from people who did or didn’t have plant X nearby. Be that as it may, there was no actual physical plant survey available, just generalisations such as willow normally grows near water… and so on.
The only thing I could realistically do was ask for feedback from beekeepers if anything was missing or out of place. That feedback option remains.
Moving on, the solution became building aggregate collections that suit various habitats, then allow the beekeeper choose from a list of various habitats that were identified as local to various settlements across the UK. This was torturous, as you can imagine. And by torturous, I mean repetitive and boring once the spreadsheets needed to be worked on. Not hard work, just mind-numbing. Ugh.
Anyway, it was all worthwhile as the end result was a product I could call reasonably accurate and not some bodge job. There was source data from official sources, geographical data and of course, the habitat data all combining to give a good view of the available forage in any area of the UK.
In the end, I had a reasonably accurate list of forage, based on habitats and locale, with flowering windows built in, and I was using established development delays.
I thought it was finished.
