Making forest data accessible to the people it affects most

The challenge was not a lack of information.

Over many years, forestry data had been collected and published by government agencies, research institutions, regulators, and other organisations. However, much of this information remained difficult to discover, difficult to search, and difficult to interpret.

The client wanted to improve transparency around forest management by bringing together these fragmented datasets and making them available through a single platform.

The audience was broad and varied. Customary landowners, policymakers, researchers, journalists, students, businesses, and campaigners all needed access to the same information, but each group would approach the data with different levels of expertise and different goals.

The platform therefore needed to make complex information accessible without oversimplifying it.

With limited budget and a large amount of data to organise, prioritisation became critical.

We adopted an Agile approach, focusing first on the minimum features required to make the platform useful and launching with the most valuable capabilities before expanding further.

One of the earliest challenges was deciding how users would navigate the information. Without the resources available for extensive user testing, we worked closely with stakeholders to identify the most likely routes into the data.

The portal was structured around the categories users were most likely to investigate, including provinces, logging companies, and licence types. This gave users multiple ways to explore information depending on the questions they were trying to answer.

The goal was to help people move from raw data to meaningful insight as quickly as possible.

The project was about more than charts and datasets.

Many users needed access to the original evidence behind the records, including reports, licences, and supporting documentation. To support this, we designed a document repository that sat alongside the structured data.

Users could view and download original source materials while also accessing machine-readable versions where documents had been converted from scanned images into searchable text.

This significantly improved accessibility and made it easier for researchers and investigators to locate relevant information without manually reviewing large volumes of documents.

By combining structured data with supporting evidence, the platform strengthened both transparency and trust.

The portal was built using Vue.js, Nginx, and C3.js, a reusable charting library built on top of D3.

This architecture allowed us to create interactive visualisations capable of presenting large datasets in a format that remained understandable for non-technical users.

Performance and usability were prioritised throughout, ensuring users could move between datasets, visualisations, and supporting documents without unnecessary friction.

The result was a platform that balanced analytical depth with accessibility.

The PNGi Forests platform transformed a complex collection of forestry records into a practical tool for investigation, analysis, and public understanding.

By bringing together multiple sources of information and presenting them through a single interface, the platform improved transparency around forest management and logging activity across Papua New Guinea.

Most importantly, it helped ensure that information previously accessible only to specialists became available to the communities, organisations, and decision-makers most affected by it.

The project demonstrated how thoughtful product design and information architecture can make large-scale environmental data significantly more useful and impactful.