The United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) contracted Axiom to build a web-based tool to assess the distribution of Aleutian Island seabird populations as well as guide fine-tuned and seasonally-sensitive management of shipping routes and response capabilities based on risk to seabird populations.

The data for this project was spread across more than 1000 individual species and season specific data files, describing the approximately 100 species (est. 40 million individuals) and 200 islands in the Aleutian Islands. Uniformly formatting, integrating, and visualizing seasonal species density and risk analyses requires high volume and availability storage, innovative filtering and retrieval mechanisms, and careful display to make the data clear to the end user.

Axiom designed a unique backend data store for the web-portal from which data is retrieved from indexed geotiffs or a gridded netCDF version of the data depending on visualization or statistical need or the end user. This infrastructure allows gigabytes of raster data to be quickly displayed, queried, and filtered. Tools to query and summarize data at points or within polygons provide means for resource managers to better understand and use this complex data.