Botanic Gardens of Sydney and AdaptNSW

The Client

The Botanic Gardens of Sydney and AdaptNSW are key New South Wales government initiatives driving the state’s approach to climate resilience and environmental restoration. While the Botanic Gardens of Sydney delivers the vital plant conservation, botanical research, and scientific tools needed to restore ecosystems, AdaptNSW provides the authoritative climate data, localized projections, and strategic risk-management guides that empower communities, businesses, and government to adapt to a changing climate.

The Situation

Restoration professionals across New South Wales rely on complex genetic and climate datasets to make seed sourcing decisions for revegetation projects — work that is critical to building climate resilience across the state's ecosystems. Botanic Gardens of Sydney and AdaptNSW had the scientific depth to support that work, but existing digital tools were fragmented, slow, and difficult to use. Two separate tools needed to be consolidated into a single, guided experience capable of serving both specialist practitioners and less technical users, while meeting NSW Government standards and scaling alongside evolving climate datasets.

The Challenge

The existing R-based backend relied on legacy geospatial libraries that buckled under the combined weight of climate and genetic datasets, resulting in query times of up to 37 seconds — slow enough to undermine user trust and adoption. The NSW Digital Design System didn’t natively support the split-screen layouts, dynamic overlays, and full-screen map interactions the tool required, meaning a formal brand exemption would need to be secured. 

Additionally, integrating multiple layers of real-time climate projections, species data, and seed sourcing overlays required tight architectural coordination between the Drupal front end and the client's R-based scientific model. And throughout, the solution had to remain accessible to non-technical users without sacrificing scientific depth.

The Solution

Initially, the organization engaged Acquia partner Sitback Solutions to simply apply NSW Government branding to the site and conduct a light UX review. However, during the first workshop, the client’s vision for the site became clearer, leading the teams to embark on a more ambitious rebuild. Sitback Solutions led the strategic redesign and full implementation of Restore and Renew, a climate decision-support tool built on Drupal and hosted on Acquia Cloud Platform.

Sitback began with a structured discovery phase — conducting UX research, stakeholder workshops, and a deep technical review of the existing R-based model, APIs, infrastructure, and Mapbox implementation. This produced a prioritized roadmap and performance strategy before any build work commenced.

The team rebuilt the application as a Next.js front end integrated with the Drupal CMS and deployed to the Acquia Cloud Platform and AWS. Drupal serves as the authoritative content engine, powering all editable content — species data, labels, help text, and configuration — through custom entities and APIs, giving content editors full governance without developer involvement. Botanic Gardens of Sydney secured a formal NSW Digital Design System brand exemption to accommodate the tool's advanced interaction requirements, including split-screen layouts, dynamic overlays, and full-screen map interactions, and then Sitback applied the redesign to mirror the parent NSW government digital branding.

Performance engineering was central to the build. Sitback refactored legacy geospatial libraries, containerized the R statistical engine using Docker to enable horizontal scaling, and implemented Redis caching, map caching, WebSocket-based queue management, and intelligent wait-time feedback. The team designed the infrastructure to accommodate immediate traffic growth and scale to at least ten times current usage with minimal cost impact. Sitback delivered the solution across seven sprints, performing code reviews, performance testing, WCAG 2.2 AA compliance validation, and structured user acceptance testing before launch.

The Results

The new web tool, called Restore and Renew, delivered measurable improvements across performance, usability, and scale.

The most significant outcome was a 92% reduction in query response times — from 37 seconds to 3 seconds — transforming the tool from a sluggish prototype into a reliable, real-time decision-support platform. The team validated the redesign through usability testing with 12 participants, which confirmed streamlined multi-step workflows, clearer map interactions, and reduced friction in report generation. Eleven of 12 participants fully read onboarding content,  a finding that runs counter to the conventional UX assumption that users dismiss pop-ups and speaks to the genuine relevance of the material for the specialist professional audiences.

The platform meets WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility standards and is built to scale — its architecture supports an immediate 20% uplift in usage and can accommodate at least ten times current traffic levels with minimal performance or cost impact. Content editors can manage species data, labels, and help content without developer involvement, reducing maintenance overhead and improving operational agility.

By making complex climate and genetic datasets accessible and actionable, Restore and Renew now supports restoration professionals across New South Wales in making evidence-based, climate-resilient seed sourcing decisions at scale, with stable, high-performance access to climate projections, species overlays, and downloadable reports.