Manage Natural Areas, Trails, and Tourism Infrastructure Centrally from the Office
NIS-Desktop is designed for the management, maintenance, and visualization of natural areas and tourism regions on a desktop computer. Nature parks, municipalities, trail associations, and tourism organizations can use it to systematically manage hiking, cycling, and themed trails, as well as signs, benches, shelters, parking areas, and points of interest (POIs), using standardized terminology compliant with DWV standards. At its core is a central PostgreSQL/PostGIS database, allowing multiple organizations to work simultaneously on the same up-to-date dataset, even across administrative boundaries.
NIS-Desktop is fundamentally open source under the AGPL v3 license and permanently free to use. Server hosting, up-to-date geospatial base data, updates, quality assurance, and support are available through an optional service package without the need for your own server infrastructure, complex installation, or a long-term subscription.
Key features include:
- Trail management with categorization, trail surface information, and analysis tools
- Infrastructure management with photos, responsibilities, and trail stewardship assignments
- Trail inspections and defect reporting with notification and resolution workflows
- Signpost and trail-marker generator with print-ready vector PDF output
- Map printing for hiking maps, information boards, flyers, and brochures
- Export to GPX, KML, Shapefile, GeoPackage, or Excel; web integration via WMS/WMTS
- Weekly updated geospatial base data (OpenStreetMap, ALKIS, digital terrain models, emergency meeting points)
- Role-based access control and a complete audit trail of changes