Maps for a changing planet — Part 3
Tools for creating and sharing environmental data
Location tools can help us understand complex data, create engaging campaigns, and build solutions. This week, we’re profiling projects from nine builders who are using data and maps as part of their responses to environmental issues locally and globally. Our first post looked at translating complex data to make it personal, and our second post looked at using maps for engagement and mobilization.
Maps grow from data. And data needs builders who create and tend it, contributing to an ecosystem of information (ideally open, when appropriate) that we can collectively use to better understand and navigate our world.
Whether it is maps that share the addresses of charging stations, the geolocations of illegal pollution, or the extent of flooding in the wake of a cyclone, there are dedicated people behind the datasets building tools for data creation, management, and sharing.
These teams are building tools to help create and share data to respond to environmental challenges.
Open Charge Map: On the frontlines of a transportation revolution
Electric vehicles are experiencing massive growth worldwide. But everywhere drivers face the same route planning question — where to charge? There are many data services offering to help answer this question, but most require payment for their proprietary data.
Open Charge Map, started in 2011, is an open, global data registry of the locations of electric vehicle charging stations, compiled from various open data sources and crowdsourced information. Built and maintained by a community of volunteers led by Christopher Cook, Open Charge Map is rapidly becoming a critical resource for builders of apps and services for electric vehicle drivers.
To respond to demand from both drivers and other developers, the Open Charge Map builders have been improving both the API and web app. Already in the first three months of 2019, Open Charge Map provided information directly to over 30,000 users of the web app and over 3.6 million queries to its API, all using open data and all for free.
The latest web app is built to be easy to use from desktop or mobile and uses TypeScript, Angular 7, Ionic 4, Mapbox GL JS, and Mapbox basemaps. Christopher Cook explains the choice:
Performance, especially on mobile, was a key concern and Mapbox GL JS leads the pack in unleashing the full power present in modern desktop and mobile hardware. Behind the scenes the app uses a mapping abstraction to allow map providers to be changed and we have evaluated several to varying degrees of success, with Mapbox proving to be the best overall — and an OpenStreetMap derived basemap also fits with the open data approach of the project.
Explore the web app and API at https://openchargemap.org — and join the community of builders behind this open data resource.
Digital Democracy: On the frontlines of community-led Amazon protection
The Indigenous communities of the Alianza Ceibo have united in their efforts to defend their rights and traditional lands from oil development, logging, mining, and other forms of destructive resource extraction in the Western Amazon. These communities are working with partners Amazon Frontlines and Digital Democracy to use technology to create data to support their legal cases, advocacy campaigns, and land management.
This long-standing partnership has resulted in the development of Mapeo Desktop and Mapeo Mobile. These offline-first, open source, user-friendly mapping tools can be used by teams of mappers and environmental monitors within communities to document boundaries and features of traditional lands as well as incidents of environmental destruction and pollution. These community-collected data can then be used to create powerful campaigns like this interactive map that tells the story of the Waorani’s resistance to oil exploration. Communities decide what data to share and in what form, which is appropriate given the need for sensitivity and privacy for some of the data. But the larger project to build Mapeo embraces open source sharing so that communities around the world can use these tools.
This week, my colleague Alex Yule is visiting with the Waorani and the Kofan with Amazon Frontlines and Digital Democracy to learn more about their mapping processes and share skills on QGIS and Mapbox Studio. Follow @yuletide on Twitter for the latest updates.
Ona: On the frontlines of climate disaster response
When large-scale environmental changes run up against human populations they often take the form of natural disasters. There are many tools available to support the prediction of extreme weather events, but after they strike we need other tools and data to recover and rebuild.
When Cyclone Idai hit Mozambique, Malawi, and Zimbabwe the resulting flooding, infrastructure damage, and population displacement triggered a “system wide L3” humanitarian response — signaling a global effort to respond to the most complicated type of emergency. Nearly 200,000 structures have been identified from satellite imagery and ground assessments as destroyed or damaged; 72,000 people are still in shelters; and diseases like cholera and malaria are continuing to spread. Cyclone Kenneth is threatening Mozambique again.
Ona is a social enterprise based in Nairobi that builds data infrastructure for governments and development organizations. The team at Ona is supporting several agencies to respond to Cyclone Idai with data collection and this holistic dashboard for the response, including the government of Mozambique, UNICEF, OCHA and WFP. Matt Berg of Ona explains what they are building:
Partner teams on the ground are using OCHA [United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs] assessment forms. Then we pull those data into Canopy, our data warehouse, from OCHA’s Kobo server and HDX (Humdata.org) and present the data in real-time, easy to use dashboards and maps.
The dashboard is based on Gisida, Ona’s open source toolkit for building visualizations with simple extensions to the Mapbox Style Spec, enabling easy data joins, choropleths, time series analysis, autogenerated legends and more. Data can be fed in live from other sources, to easily share an interactive, styled map. As Ona puts it
Our hope was to create a standardized way to create, publish and share data visualized in maps. Right now this is largely achieved in the humanitarian community by emailing PDF maps. Mapbox open standards approach provided the perfect foundation for creating standardized, shareable interactive maps.
The response is ongoing. Mapbox is helping Ona to process and integrate large datasets into the Cyclone Ida Response Platform, including Facebook Population Maps (built from machine learning processes on satellite and open data), and hundreds of gigabytes of drone imagery recently flown in Mozambique, and brought back to higher connectivity countries for processing
You can support organizations that are assisting with Cyclone Idai response and recovery by helping to trace buildings and roads from imagery with the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team.
The Mapbox Community team partners with world-changing organizations and individuals using location tools to help solve social and environmental challenges. Are you building solutions to create and share environmental data? Get in touch!
Maps for a changing planet — Part 3 was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.