Browsing the site

The site is structure by theme and within each theme the content can be viewed by framework and by topic.

Each theme is structured the same way so once you understand one theme you can browse through all the themes - the one exception to this is Atmosphere which has two sub-theme:  Climate and Ambient air quality.

The global navigation at the top of each page is designed to aggregate 'like' content and allow you to browse across the content.  The left navigation on each page allows you to drill down through the content specific to the particular area of the site you are reading.

How can I read a theme from start to finish?

Choose a theme you'd like to read and start at the theme home page.  To find a theme try looking at the list of themes linked from the header.

Using Biodiversity as an example here's how you could navigate through an individual theme:

From the Biodiverisity home page read

• the Executive summary,
• Key findings,
• Acknowledgements

Move on to:

• Approach
• Introduction

theme-homepage-example.png

Read through the report by framework (they contain all the topics, the topics have links to the assessment summaries) in this order:

1. Pressures
2. State and trends
3. Effectiveness of management
4. Resilience
5. Risks
6. Outlook

The other links you can see on the left navigation allow you to read by topic only and to quickly jump to the assessment summaries.

And if all of that doesn't excite you there's always the PDF for each theme available from the download section.

How do I search?

You do a quick keyword search from the top right corner of every page - the search box in the header. Just pop in a search term and hit the magnifying glass or select a facet (site wide, region, assessment summary) - in most cases just a word or term and clicking the magnifying glass will get you what you want.

But wait, there's more.  We also have some very sophisticated advanced search options with lots of filters to use:

• General site wide search
• By content tagged with a region
• Assessment summaries only

Let's deconstruct those:

Site wide searching allows you to search all the content on the site.  Use the filters to narrow down your search and really hone in on the content of interest to you.  For example you might only want to see the latest maps for the Land theme.  You would choose the filters like so:

search-filters.png

Image of search filter selections

you would end up with search results looking like this:

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Image showing search results

You might notice we have a filter for tags - these are keywords we've tagged to our content, it's more targeted than just a simple keyword search - try it.

Region search lets you look for content that we are able to tag with a region - that's not everything, we can't tag all our content with a specific region, we report at a national scale.

To search by region select one or more filter - that could be theme, year framework etc and hit the search button, you will see results with the region highlighted on the map. Or, you could select a region from the map and see what comes up.

You can zoom in and out on the map and select multiple regions.

Assessment summary search allows you to filter in a lot of ways - year, theme, grade, trend etc. But, it also lets you see what has changed since the last report for an individual component - so you can run your own mini-report on changes in assessment summary content and quickly what's improved (or not).

To compare changes from one reporting cycle to another use the fields called:

• Grade change from previous report
• Trend change from previous report
• Confidence in grade change from previous report
• Confidence in trend change from previous report

If your search parameters don't bring back any results consider broadening your search again.

Here's an example - this search is looking for anything where the grade has deteriorated AND the trend has deteriorated

as-search-change.jpg

What are topic pages?

These are the most detailed areas of the site. A topic is always part of a theme and sits within a framework or the introduction to a theme.

Topics contain a wide range of content types - narrative text, graphs, maps, case studies, links to assessment summaries.

The right sidebar of a topic page contains quick links and author information:

• On this page will take you to content on that page - use those to jump to an area of interest
• More information expands to show you
  • 2016 topics related to the theme and framework you are viewing & 2011 topics for comparison - use these to quickly jump to another topic or to compare back to a previous report
  • Cross cutting issues are topics that are directly related to the topic you are reading but not in the same theme or framework - use these to understand a topic or issue from a wider perspective
  • Related subjects are areas of interest discussed in a topic but may not have a direct relationship, they are based on keyword tags - use these to see everything tagged with the same keyword
• Author block shows you who wrote this topic - clicking an author will take you to their biography page, you can cite this page by clicking cite this page a pop-up window will display content you can copy
• Share allows you to share the page you are on through your social media channels or via email 

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Example of a right sidebar

How do I use or view assessment summaries?

Assessment summaries can be viewed in a couple of ways, within a theme or by advanced search.  In some cases the title of an assessment summary or a component in an assessment summary has changed between reporting cycles - we have replicated the previous reports component to allow comparison between reporting cycles - these have been clearly identified.

Assessment summaries in themes

There's a link from the left navigation on each theme page it takes you to an assessment summary list page for that theme - on that page you can filter by year and framework to get to the assessment summary you want to view.

Once viewing an assessment summary you will see a list of components that make up that summary - these components are made of the following parts:

• title
• summary - an explanation of the component.
• grade and trend - is it in good or bad condition, is it in decline or improving?
• confidence in grade and trend - is there enough data or information to support this assessment?
• comparability to the previous report - how similar is this assessment to the previous assessment in terms of information available, scope of the component.
• supporting information showing how the author made the assessment - was the assessment made from expert opinion, data, a mix of both, what other research was used to make this assessment.
• tags showing topics and regions they relate to - clicking on the topic will take you to the topic page relevant to the component.

Assessment summaries can be filtered to show both the current and previous report or just one report.

Assessment summary within a search result

There is a power way of viewing assessment summary components based on a number of different variables.

On the assessment summary search page you can choose to refine assessment summary components and see changes between reporting years - this allows comparison between years and grades etc. See the above section on searching assessment summaries.

Graphs and maps

Wherever possible we have created graphs and maps for SoE 2016 from data files stored on data.gov.au (see the data section).  Occasionally the data for a graph may be just too big making the topic page it's on load very slowly, in those instances we use an image and provide a link to download the data set. Most maps are interactive unless they come from data that was not available under Creative Commons.

Interacting with graphs

• Hover over the lines, bars, area etc in a graph and you will see the data values.
• Turn data series on or off by clicking on the legend beneath the X axis on the graph
• Download the graph as an image (png and svg) by clicking the relevant download button - note that IE users should right click in the graph and save the image
• Download the data by clicking on the download data link and going to data.gov.au

Interacting with maps

• Click on the map in a topic page - that pops up a window with our data catalogue and the spatial layer for the map you are looking at
• Download an image of the map you are looking at
• More help is available in the pop-up window about adding data, sharing and downloading the map

Data

Data can be downloaded from the links beneath a graph or map, we've also provided quite a bit of information on our Data page about where our information comes from and how to access it.  Once you've clicked on the download data link you will go to our data.gov.au site and the information page for the dataset you want, from there you can download the data file.