Stewardship Tracking System (STS) is a tool built to help conservation organizations efficiently map and enter data about stewardship projects and enable them to track and report accomplishments by various performance indicators (e.g., trees planted, hectares treated, number of landowners/volunteers engaged, etc.). By spatially mapping of stewardship projects, the STS could provide input to landscape analysis and planning and support subsequent reporting on strategic landscape objectives.

The STS was set up with security measures that enable users to designate which organizations can view their detailed data (e.g., mapping, confidential, proprietary and other sensitive information).

The Stewardship Tracking System  was applied to track stewardship for the Lake Simcoe watershed in another web application called the Ontario Invasives Tracking System, which was developed and maintained by COMAP that enables conservation practitioners to track invasive species occurrences and associated mitigation measures in the watershed. The website was developed under the leadership of the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters with Ministry of Natural Resources as a partner, and funded by the  Lake Simcoe Clean Up Fund (LSCUF).

The ITS web mapping application was developed to enable citizen scientists as well as conservation professionals to report sightings of both aquatic and terrestrial invasive species
and accurately map their location directly on high resolution air photography. The resulting
system has facilities for:

•  tracking, mapping and reporting on invasive species in search, discovery, remediation and monitoring stages of invasives management ,
•  and for capturing, reporting and tracking of remedial action.

The ITS project is a database and a web-based set of applications that accesses spatial data and information in real-time from distributed sources over the Internet. The ITS was planned to permit the southern Ontario conservation community participants to work collaboratively by:

• entering spatial (polygon) and tabular data, photos and documents about their invasives species sightings and ecological restoration projects as well as exporting entered data to external geographic information systems;
• querying the database to meet their needs for tracking invasives species sightings and specific restoration projects;
• reporting and summarizing monitoring data about invasives species sightings and restoration projects by numerous parameters; and
• implementing adaptive management of ecological restoration practices based on an ever-expanding base of knowledge about the factors that contribute to successful ecological restoration projects.

The ITS system was subsequently repaced with the American EDD Maps service to enable cross-border tracking. The Stewardship Tracking System website can be accessed:  Click Here