Monday 22 June 2015

Two gull migrations - visualised

Lifewatch INBO (Belgium) are monitoring Lesser Black-backed Gulls (Larus fuscus) using GPS 'backpacks' developed by the University of Amsterdam. They've already created some great visualisations, and data from previous years has been made available as open data, for others to explore.
In this visualisation, follow Gull 719 (aka "Harry") in red, and Gull 623 in blue, on their movements over one year. See below for how the map was made (although I'll probably keep tweaking it!). Full screen map here
I've used Leaflet to setup the map backdrop combining two different sources, then added two separate map visualisations already created within Cartodb by taking chunks of Lifewatch INBO's data. The visualisations are made using the Torque function. Using the visualisations loaded separately onto the backdrop map, I've got two Torque animations working at once in the same map, which isn't supported within Cartodb itself.

One problem - clicking the pause button only pauses one of the gulls! I'm going to keep tweaking it to improve..


Gull tracking data has been published to the Public Domain CC0 1.0.
Stienen E, Desmet P, Hernandez F, Bouten W, Lens L (2014): Bird tracking - GPS tracking of Lesser Black-backed Gull and Herring Gull breeding at the Belgian coast. v5.2. Research Institute for Nature and Forest (INBO). Dataset/Occurrence. http://doi.org/10.15468/02omly