The Lower Columbia River Estuary Partnership (LCREP) came to ThinkShout in the winter of 2010 to help it better manage its watershed restoration and monitoring data for the Lower Columbia River watershed. LCREP had previously worked with proprietary GIS systems and web applications, but was frustrated with the costs of these solutions, as well as their inflexibility and lack of integration with content management and social media features.

To solve these problems, ThinkShout built LCREP an open source mash-up using Drupal, Mapstraction and Google Maps. Drupal provides LCREP with flexible content management tools. Mapstraction provides flexible integration between the Drupal CMS and mapping providers, such as Google Maps, Bing Maps, Yahoo Maps, etc. And Google provides the mapping tiles, as well as a great user experience.

Maps.LCREP.org allows LCREP to display a variety of restoration and monitoring data. LCREP has the flexibility to manage its own custom map icons, add new monitoring parameters and tags, and upload images that are added to dynamic slideshows.