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Developing A Fishing App For Colorado

CPW Fishing is the official fishing app of Colorado Parks and Wildlife. CPW Fishing lets users discover and search over 1,300 fishing destinations across Colorado for their own use. The app also allows users to view a location’s popularity, ease of access, which fish species are present, stream gauges and more. Users can record days on the water, journal their catches, and place catch locations on the map. Much like many other apps, CPW Fishing exists to make certain activities easier through the use of data. Xentity Corporation is developing the app and acting as the backend manager. They are also responsible for the ongoing application and backend server maintenance.

Developing An App For Anglers

The issues addressed by the Xentity team included the fact that the CPW’s Esri web portal failed to provide an offline and mobile solution. It also did not provide any ability for anglers to track their catch/fishing history. Anglers also needed a simple method to understand local and statewide regulations for lake and stream bodies of water. And from the organization’s perspective, the CPW wished to better understand the fishing habits and fishing pressure (how many people are fishing in a certain area/body of water).

So, an app capable of solving these issues became a major need. Local anglers and community members interested in fishing information and species distributions stood to benefit from this app’s development. Furthermore, CPW wanted their app to allow access to local and statewide regulations for lake and stream bodies of water. Also, to allow anglers a place to record journal entries on their catches.

In developing the CPW Fishing App, Xentity is implementing an Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) process that is designed to migrate data from the authoritative CPW fishing data into a mobile friendly database. Xentity is also providing a data management platform for new authoritative data and dashboards into new journal entry data. Keeping track of all this data, the CPW can also help understand stocking needs for certain rivers (releasing fish into areas where people are overfishing).

Communicating With The Fishing Community

Through this app’s development, the CPW has been able to engage with 60,000 users to date via the mobile fishing app. They also engaged with over 8,000 journal entries. Also, a better understanding of which species are being recorded and in which bodies of water. The CPW also better understands the demographics of their mobile users and how they are using the app. (marketing campaigns to attract new anglers/potential future users).

Xentity’s efforts are providing a more efficient, streamlined tools for the CPW’s catch of the week, master anglers program, and stocking report updates. These efforts provide alternative analytics from citizen data instead of traditional Creel Surveys (sampling surveys that target recreational anglers). The public can access information. Then they record journal entries (about their catches, location information, species, technique or method used) for themselves. Xentity provides similar services in other territories outside the state of Colorado. In other words, organizations with similar pain points can now leverage similar services due to the success of this app. 

Updates – Fishing App Maintenance, 2022

Xentity is continuing to provide Mobile Fishing Application Support Services and SaaS Hosting Fees through 2022. This includes:

  • Monthly review of app store reviews and summary report
  • 24/7 Active Monitoring of cloud services including database logs, server loads, error logs
  • Access to the CPW Management System
  • Access to RESTful API’s for CPW web site
  • Tier 1 email access to support
  • Tier 2 and Tier 3 phone support for CPW staff