Comprehensive Outdoor Calendar

Venture Outdoors is working on a web site that will be a comprehensive outdoor activity calendar and much more, based on a visual approach. 3RBC President Jack Solomon is very interested because it could include the ability to find, in a single site, all outdoor events, including birding and other natural history events, of our club and other groups, sorted by date, type of activity, or place.

Since the passing of the calendar in the Nature Observer News, there's been a lack of a single source for this kind of information. The Green Map will include not only event details, but information about all kinds of locations and organizations as well. Jack says he hopes that all the Western Pennsylvania natural history oriented groups will participate in this effort.

Kerry Morsek  who is working on this for Venture Outdoors, sent some forms for the site (posted below). The forms are designed to allow anyone and everyone to contribute to the information on the Green Map. Individuals are invited to fill them in — printed out or on the computer — and send them to Venture Outdoors to be included. There are separate forms for each type of entry.  Please take a look at them posted below (MS Word format).

While specific people from each group will submit the events and organization forms, we would expect that completed location forms would welcome from a broader population.

Organization Description Form
Site Description Form
Event Submission Form

If you have any questions about how to fill the forms out, where to send them, or what this project is all about, don’t hesitate to email or phone Kerry at Venture Outdoors at 412-255-0564 x32.

Note: Most of the forms are rather easy to understand, but sometimes finding an exact longitude and latitude can be tricky. One useful site is http://www.terraserver-usa.org, which allows users to look at topographic maps or aerial photos.

Kerry’s advice:

Users can enter in the address of their location if they know it. There is also an advanced find option that can search by zip code, or other minimal information. Sometimes it yields great results, sometimes not. Additionally, there is a tab within the advanced find that allows users to search by place. In this field you can type something like “Frick Park”. Latitude and longitude appear on the left-hand side of the screen. These values will change whenever you click within a map or image, so users can manually locate a spot even if the software doesn’t recognize the name. (This can be helpful when you know roughly where something is, but don’t have an address to enter in. You can call up the needed map and just move the cursor to where your site is.)