Creating an ESRI dashboard that displays species occurrence by watershed

Question

I have an area of interest broke into regions with the typical attributes you would expect (area, perimeter, name, type, etc.) and added a 'Species Present' field that I populated using a large database of point observations. The 'Species Present' field records are entered as text separated by a comma ie, dog, cat, fish, etc. however I did also add fields for each individual species which could be used instead (there are ~25 species of interest).

I would like to create a web application with ArcGIS Online tools that displays two things:

1. A map of my area of interest where each region can be selected and then display the species present within it. This seems fairly straight forward in the most basic sense however I want it to interact with the second feature I would like included.
2. A list of all species present (along with photo and brief description) that you can select a species and have the regions it is present within be highlighted on the map.

I thought dashboards would work well for this but I'm new to dashboards and I can't seem to wrap my head around how to make it function the way I want it to. Some of the basic tools I need seem to exist (like filtering by "contains") but I think I am approaching it wrong.

Answer 1

So the first key thing is to ensure the map you use has all required layers within it (Based on your question I assume this is already done).

As you say adding the map into the dashboard is simple and you don't need to do anything further to this component to add controls.

I think you need to break the next part into different components:

1. List of species (List)
2. Photo (Embedded Content)
3. Description (Details)

Set up those 3 components individually and have display them as you would want them (ignoring filtering at this point).

You should then be able to go into the List element and add an Action such as a Filter target aimed at the Details element. You can then add more targets, so one for the embedded content (untested!) and then the layers in the map (you have to target each layer individually, not the map as a whole).

When targeting a layer, you will need a common field to link them, as seen in the screenshot below. I don't have a full similar setup to show, but this should help you understand the concept.

The only part I'm not fully sure on is the embedded content, but theoretically it should work (if you store the image path as a attribute in your layer).