Animal Welfare Professionals

We are looking to acquire GIS mapping software to track data of all sorts, but most immediately to map Free-Roaming cat colonies. Any suggestions?

Google Docs and Map Marker .  

@Slstryker and @BSimonsen - useful links?

What about ArcGis or CyberTracker?

Cyber tracker is much clunkier and has many fewer capabilities than ESRI Collector or ESRI Survey123, which are the two main apps for field data collection. I've used both.

We have used ESRI's ArcGIS program to identify stray (dogs and cats) hotspots where we can concentrate on tags and microchip clinics, target spay neuter resources and nearest veterinarians,  and identify unaltered stray cats so we can concentrate spay/neuter efforts in those areas for pet owned cats so they possibly do not become a part of a reproducing colony.  I'm sure you can use to map your free-roaming cat colonies.  ESRI has a non-profit rate you can apply for, about $100 a year.

Check out www.catstats.org.  It is free and covers much of what you are looking for.  It is run by Bryan Kortis at Neighborhood Cats. 

There's a cool startup out of Ukraine using blockchain to locate and manage strays: https://animal-id.info/en, lmk if you'd like an intro.

@JohnDBoone

I use ArcGIS software (AGOL on line, desktop software, and the multitude various apps, which are excellent) extensively for work and for the animal welfare projects I've consulted for. In fact, I just returned from the ESRI user conference in San Diego! I think that unless you are just doing a small circumscribed project, you are far better served in the long run by learning the parts of the Arc system that would be useful to you than by using an alternative. The capabilities and potential applications of that system are almost unlimited. I won't lie, there's a little bit of a learning curve, but getting up to speed with just AGOL and the handful of apps that would be useful to you is a manageable task, and there is a huge amount of helpful self training information and support on line. My impression is the the animal welfare world is belatedly starting to become aware of just how useful this software can be for their mission, and I expect to see it used more and more frequently. Happy to elaborate more, either on the forum or offline.

Thank you John! If you wouldn't mind emailing me your contact information at skendrick@hawaiianhumane.org I'd love to be able to pick your brain as we expand our community cat program.

will do

I would love to see this application combined with something like NextDoor to personalize it for people in neighborhoods....maybe motivate them to get involved - or at least understand/not hate community cats and TNR effots...

You can personalize the ESRI apps almost infinitely, and certain ones (like Survey 123 and Story Maps) have capabilities built in to allow them to be used to easily "crowd source" information or to inform the public. Viewers and respondents don't have to have individual accounts in order to participate in other words. See

I suggest considering your needs (now and future) and matching the power of the application with your needs and willingness/desire to learn new programs.  AGOL is indeed amazing and the desktop ESRI software adds a lot of power to analysis...the apps are good (collector, survey123).  If you don't mind the learning curve then this is a solid option.  

There are many other options too with lower barriers to entry:  google maps, bing maps, Excel has built in native mapping capabilities (and some cool ways to animate time series maps) etc.  While these are not as robust, the ease of entry is nice.  You might want to experiment with these first to see how much you will be wanting to use this type of analysis before jumping in with a more powerful suite of tools (a tool is only worthwhile if you will use it).  Also depends on how much "in field" data you want to collect vs how much will just be using existing spreadsheets or shelter data systems reports.

For the adventurous QGIS is an open source (aka FREE) program that is really good but again...expect a learning curve!

We just learned that excel will map!!!

https://m.

Carto is a great free and relatively easy to use software for making nice looking maps