The Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Web site is an action-packed Internet destination that brings Montana's outdoors to the computer desktop. Wildlife (and other attractions) on the Web

If only all government Web sites could be like the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Web site.

The site, www.fwp.mt.gov, has grown by leaps and bounds in just the last few years, in terms of sheer content, interactive services and overall use. It is an action-packed Internet destination that brings Montana's outdoors to the desk top.

"The speed and the sophistication of material that has been added to our Web site has just been overwhelming," said Jim Williams, the department's Northwest Montana regional wildlife manager.

Like many department staffers across the state, Williams constantly uses the site.

"Let me show you a cool thing," he says enthusiastically, clicking to an educational feature called "Discover Montana's Ecosystems."

It is a map-driven, photo-rich encyclopedia of Montana's grasslands and forest ecosystems. A click to Plains Grasslands reveals dozens of photos of animals, amphibians, reptiles, fish and birds that inhabit Eastern Montana. There also is a detailed section on plains vegetation.

The Discover feature also includes wildlife film footage.

"Kids love this for wildlife," Williams said. "It needs to be as engaging as other products out there that kids enjoy. For kids, this is what it takes."

With 3.6 million visits annually, the Fish, Wildlife and Parks Web site is second only to Travel Montana in state government Web sites in terms of use. Visitor traffic has been growing at a rate of about 7 to 8 percent annually for the last seven years.

"We don't see things slowing down as we move more and more services and content onto our Web site," said Janet Hess-Herbert, the department's Information Management Bureau chief.

Back in 2004, the bureau crunched some numbers to reflect how voluminous the site is and the use it gets:

"If all of the data sent from the Web server was represented as an article in pages of Montana Outdoors - with no pictures - the magazine would have an extra half billion pages and come in at a slim 29 miles thin … all at a svelte weight of nearly 10,000 tons."

Hess-Herbert said the site has grown exponentially since then, mostly with "dynamic content" that is constantly being modified.

The site's growth, she said, stretches back to the 2001 fire season when the department was trying to relay information on state lands that were impacted by the fires. The Web site tapped into the state's Natural Resources Information System mapping database.

And that revealed to Hess-Herbert and others a potential that was first expressed in the development of a multi-layered Hunt Planner that is one of the site's most interactive and popular features.

"My favorite part of the Web site is the Hunt Planner," Williams said. "There is just an unbelievable amount of information."

The planner lets users tap into a hunting district or a geographic area to generate maps reflecting district boundaries, topographic features, even aerial photographs showing vegetation patterns.

But that's not all: The system is linked to voluminous and often-changing hunting regulations. So a hunter can find what species and what specific regulations apply to a hunting district he or she is interested in. Another feature allows hunters to download global positioning satellite coordinates for a kill site, for example, that can be reflected on the maps generated by the Hunt Planner.

"Pretty soon we realized we could do this with state parks and fishing sites," Hess-Herbert said.

A Fishing Guide section on the site allows anglers to search for fishing opportunities, say, within 25 miles of Kalispell. Or they can search by certain lakes and streams or by region. The site takes a similar approach to state parks.

Once again, regulations are available along with stocking reports and just about any other document generated by the department related to fishing.

Hess-Herbert said the site is basically managed by herself, a Web content manager and a Web master, but staffers throughout the department and across the state regularly contribute to it.

The Information Management Bureau gets hundreds of internal requests every month to add information about Fish, Wildlife and Parks operations.

"Every time you put something else out there, it kind of generates another idea from someone else in the agency," Hess-Herbert said.

The site is the main vehicle for the department's Bear Identification program that requires bear hunters to complete a test showing an ability to differentiate between black bears and grizzly bears.

It has also been put to use as a means for the public to report wolf sightings, with reports being monitored by a crew of wolf management specialists across the state.

According to Williams, the Web site has been a tremendous communication tool that has lightened the department's work load in many ways.

"We still get lots of calls, and that's OK, but this just really helps us handle that load," said Williams, adding that he personally still prefers face-to-face services.

"The reality is that most people aren't like that anymore. I'm old school. Other people are doing things as efficiently as possible online."

The department has seen "pretty constant growth" in online hunting and fishing license sales and special permit applications since those services were added to the Web site in 2003, said Neal Whitney, the department's license bureau business analyst.

Last year, the department issued 1.3 million hunting and fishing licenses, and of those, just over 9 percent were issued online.

The department received 57,950 applications for moose, sheep and mountain goat licenses, with 39 percent coming through the Web site.

Over the next few months, the site will be gradually modified as it goes through a makeover, and Hess-Herbert expects it will continue to grow along with visitor traffic.

"There's just a great opportunity to utilize our Web site for educational purposes and we are going to continue to expand on those things," she said.

Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by e-mail at jmann@dailyinterlake.com