As part of my position, we're required to randomly select townships in our state, select forest, wetland, or grasslands and then throw random points into those habitats to create site for plant and bird samples. We've created shapefiles and points in R, but what we'd like to do is create a web-based GIS where any user (with the appropriate security clearance) can select a township, display points and polygons in that township, and the random points contained therein, and generate a map that they can print and take out to the field with them, or share with other workers.
Our base layers would be comprised of roads, land use/ land cover, cities/towns, section lines, etc. and then add our custom layers. We number each township (1-1765), then give them random ranks for each habitat. Users would need to select "Habitat Type", "Rank", and "Township" and maybe some other criteria, which would then the GIS would zoom into the township that you selected.
In the past we've done this in a piecemeal fashion where one of us would generate individual maps from a local machine in ArcGIS, but it's pretty ponderous and just having one person do it disrupts workflow. We'd like to get this set up so that each person could generate custom maps from their own work station (regardless of where that work station is located).
I've looked into GeoServer a little, but I was hoping for a little guidance on good places to start the process. We're not complete noobs, but as scientists (and not web developers), this is a little out of our comfort zone.
