By: Erin Quinn
This week we interviewed the teams that created the stunning Disappearing Rivers visualization accompanying the Disappearing West project. The Center for American Progress and Conservation Science Partners conducted the research, analysis, design, and development of the underlying data.
Often portrayed as continuous lines on a map, modern-day rivers are fragmented and impaired versions of their former selves. The average length of a river in the West has been reduced by 84 percent. -Nicole Gentile, Deputy Director, Public Lands Project
The beautiful, yet troubling map visualization — as designed by Gage Cartographic — uses Mapbox GL JS, our web mapping library, to style rivers based on the data itself, showing the extent of human disruption for hundreds of thousands of waterways.
Chief Scientist Brett Dickson captures the purpose of the project:
Rivers and streams are the life-blood of the West, and are under immense pressure, because of the ways we use and extract resources, such as urban sprawl, industrial-scale mining and agriculture, and climate change. We wanted to show compelling scientific information about how our past activities have stressed important waterways in a unique way, and to provide visuals and statistics to inform future actions and decisions that could protect or enhance our river-based landscapes and economies. -Brett G. Dickson, Ph.D., President & Chief Scientist, Conservation Science Partners
The Disappearing Rivers visualization brings to life massive amounts of data, and it also tells a compelling story with contextual menus describing key takeaways from the research. We spoke with developer Josh Gage about the process of wrangling, styling, and ultimately designing the experience:
Josh, what challenges did you face in creating the map?
Our biggest challenge on this project was visualizing almost 500,000 river segments and allowing for the user to interact quickly and retrieve information from the data.
Our datasets relied on complex, data-driven symbologies. There is variation at both local and regional scales, and we wanted to show this by symbolizing each segment appropriately. Additionally, we wanted to give users the ability to resymbolize the data on the fly and see those changes in the app.
For all these reasons, Mapbox GL JS and vector tiles were the best solutions for pulling this off. The documentation is excellent. The style spec was especially useful as we worked through applying styles to our datasets. Using a traditional stack with images tiles would have been less performant and would have limited the user experience.
Which of our tools did you find most useful?
We relied heavily on Tippecanoe in our processing workflow. Tippecanoe allowed us to reduce our dataset at smaller zoom levels, dropping unnecessary features but still giving the feel of a complete dataset. Once we had our .mbtiles created from our datasets, we then used Mapbox for hosting and serving our tiles back to the app, which we built using GL JS.
We used Studio as a bridge to figure out complex symbologies. To do this we would upload a tileset to Studio, work through symbology in the UI, download the source and then inspect the code for use and modification in our app.
What’s next, any new features you plan to explore?
We are thrilled about continued progress with GL JS and other opportunities for visualizing our data. The new dynamic hillshading looks great, and we look forward to using it for adding more detailed terrain and landscape visualizations.
The best thing we can do to protect America’s rivers
The research shows the healthiest river systems are not just those furthest away from densely populated urban areas, but also those with federally protected public land status. Nicole Gentile, Deputy Director, Public Lands Project, explains:
Protected public lands play an indispensable but under-appreciated role in supporting healthy rivers and streams. In fact, rivers that run through protected lands in the West are on average 50 percent more natural than rivers that flow through unprotected areas. Protecting the West’s wild places is essential to the conservation of the region’s water resources.
Take a look at the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness Area (below), which has a bright green glow as one of the healthiest areas on the map. This is no coincidence — in the whitewater paddling community, US Senator Frank Church of Boise, Idaho is a hero for sponsoring the 1968 Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, protecting free-flowing rivers.
I personally am immensely inspired by this project and especially Nicole Gentile’s closing note:
“Rivers and streams are remarkably resilient, and smart investments in restoring watersheds can bring back much of what has been lost.”
Let’s keep the conversation on big data visualizations for environmental impact going at Locate, May 30–31, and if you’re mapping for ecological justice and/or environmental conservation now, we’d love to hear about it! Reach out to our Community team or tweet @Mapbox to share what you’re working on.
Visualizing the Disappearing Rivers of the American West was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.