The core team responsible for the project at SPW consisted of a small number of people: Boris Delfosse, responsible for cartography at the Department of Nature and Forests, Marie Wénin, geographer and geomatician in the SIG cell of SPWARNE who coordinated the work, two specialists in hunting, and hunting advisory committees, and Benoît Thirionet, responsible for databases and statistics at DNF. Around this ‘core,’ about twenty participants in total played a role in this initiative at some point.

Marie Wénin is familiar with Esri products, partly because she uses them regularly—the Walloon region has had a framework agreement with Esri for several years—and because she is also responsible for training SPW staff in their use. “What I particularly appreciate is the user-friendliness of these solutions,” she explains. “Once certain of having the right data—accurate and updated boundaries of hunting areas and the database containing closing requests that is automatically fed by the forms—we were able to dynamically link these two data sources within ArcGIS Pro, Esri’s desktop tool.”

Subsequently, for public dissemination, the project manager can use Esri’s online tools available on Argis Online or Portal for ArcGIS, allowing hosting of information on one or more web pages. “In the case of ChasseOnWeb, we used the online portal,” clarifies Marie Wénin, adding: “We deliberately chose to create a webpage rather than a downloadable app because we wanted to limit barriers to the use of the platform as much as possible. We even bought the domain chasseonweb.be to avoid users having to enter a too complex URL. By simply entering chasseonweb.be, the citizen is redirected to the SPW/Esri portal where they find the most recent, perfectly updated information. And this regardless of the device on which they perform their search, whether it’s a computer or smartphone, as the page is responsive and therefore automatically adapts to the screen size.”