As the company's operations have grown, it has also expanded its focus on conservation. Yet, planners needed tools for rapidly evaluating potential project sites. The company's GIS team designed the missing workflows. The team used ArcGIS mapping software to compile and analyze data and create interactive site conservation values maps to guide planning and decision-making. ArcGIS Spatial Analyst provided tools for modeling the kingdom's diverse terrain and working with complex datasets. With ArcGIS Image Analyst, the GIS team worked with and refined satellite imagery that became layers for the maps.
The color-coded map would become a visual reference of conservation priority areas across the kingdom. Users would click an area of a map to determine whether species that are classified as high conservation priority live in or migrate through a location.
Planners could refer to the map and, when necessary, modify business plans in ways that protect habitats and species of high priority. The map could also become a guide for future land-use planning and land preservation work aimed at protecting biodiversity.
The work to develop conservation maps occurred in two stages. Planners first developed a system by which they could identify species and their habitats. They also established a scoring system to help them determine which species were most threatened, often because of human activities or climate change. Threatened or endangered species received higher scores, identifying them as a higher conservation priority.
To identify and document wildlife habitats and species, the team incorporated data from the Atlas of the Breeding Birds of Arabia, the International Union for Conservation and Nature, and other sources. Those efforts helped to identify 732 species of vertebrates: 499 birds and 233 mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and freshwater fish.
In the second stage of the project, planners created a geodatabase, a digital filing system for managing geographic datasets such as raster images and tables, where they could also document conservation risks and other characteristics of each species. The data might include biological uniqueness, global and regional conservation status and trends, and existing range in the kingdom. For birds, researchers also looked at preferred elevation to identify habitats more precisely.
Other considerations included proximity to urban settings, the availability of water, protected area status, vegetation type, and topographic complexity. These factors would be used to create a score from 1 to 10 for each species. So far, researchers have identified 199 vertebrates as a high conservation priority, including 102 species of birds and 97 mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and fish.