A web site to support the Reforestation of the Atlantic Forest

The Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew engaged us to convert an existing MS Access desktop database into a multilingual CMS based web site. The site is a responsive mobile and tablet friendly CMS based web site that enables the management of a database of tree data for conservation purposes. The data relate to trees native to the Atlantic Forests of Brazil that could be used for reforestation - The South Eastern Bahia Atlantic forest database.

The project is a collaboration between the Universidade Federal do Recôncavo da Bahia (UFRB), the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN) and the Royal Botanic Garden, Kew and funded and facilitated by the Kew-Rio Tinto partnership.

The data are from field collections made in Bahian interior forests  and the web site aims to provide access to these data records and be used as a tool for those who wish to restore Atlantic forest in this region, at any scale.
We chose Drupal as the CMS for this project as it is ideally suited to provide both the data management and publishing facilities required but also for its multilingual support.
The web site is translated into Brazilian Portuguese. We exported the data from the Access database to MySQL. Once in MySQL we cleaned the data and remodelled it to a relational model that enabled it to be checked for referential integrity. The various dimensions were created and applied - these covered dimension such as the species classification taxonomy and the lists of references, suppliers and other common data.
Once the data were controlled in a relational database we constructed a model within the Drupal database using content types for the various entities. The data were imported to the Drupal model and the required taxonomies and related entities were created.
The base site was built and we implemented the multilingual and search facilities that form the core of the site. An advanced search system and autocomplete lookups enable rapid searching of the rich data within the database.
We exceeded the client's expectations by developing a fully responsive custom SASS based theme for the site with the design skills of Love Creative to ensure that the presentation of the site matched the quality of the underlying functionality and to be sure that the site formed a valuable resource for this important project.