Last week

Speaking at Wuthering Bytes

Last week was a short week, as we went up to Yorkshire for Wuthering Bytes and OSHCamp (open source hardware). There was a lot of interesting talks, and there was also one on advanced 3D-printing and other things by me:

It was mostly just nice to be back where there were hills.

Hex visualisation tools

Before that, I was mostly working on options for visualising and interacting with the H3 tile based data we have. Until now we’ve either been using the site Kepler.gl as a visualiser, or using some custom rasterization code I had, but that doesn’t make it easy to explore. I had a look at setting up our own site based on keplar.gl, but that’d require me learning react, and unless I really have to I don’t have the time nor inclination to do so.

Instead I took to just looking at what I could do based on the current quantify.earth site, using a subset of data from Alison’s latest work, and I found that deck.gl, the mapping library we use already, has some support for H3 tiles:

And zoomed in

I’m not quite sure how it’d cope with the entire planet, but I think it shows some promise. The joke of course is that quantity.earth is react based too, but I suspect I can just keep fudging Sadiq’s code for now whilst we try and demonstrate this is useful.

The next steps are:

• Try a full world layer at our current resolution and see if things blow up in the browser - I was already getting Safari occasionally reload the page due to excessive memory usage with just Brazil.
• Try dumping the data into a PostGIS database to and do some simple queries on the data, to make it possible to do some simple exploration of the data.

This week coming

• Tropical Moist Forest Evaluation Methodology Implementation: whilst I was away Patrick and Tom made some progress on looking at where the data we generate deviates from expectations. The key one for me is that the methodology originally stated that we should only match pixels in the same country as the project. This turns out to be a transcription error, and in fact when a project/leakage crosses a boarder you should only match from within the same country. This makes me a little nervous about an explosion of data, but I hope most projects won’t hit this.
• Work placement student: Our work-placement student has written some code for us to process the IUCN Red List data into a single GPKG file, which I need to test out, as it's their last week.
• IUCN: Simon got in touch earlier in the month about us doing more AoH style work in collaboration, so I need to push that forward.