Study Group - Introduction to Mapbox

[vantuyls]

Matt Gregory, Senior Faculty Research Assistant in the Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society, will be leading a Study Group on Mapbox. The group get together on May 17 from 11:30-1:30 in the Willamette East and West classrooms of The Valley Library.

Come with your laptop (computers not provided) and your curiosity.

[grovduck]

Hi all, here's a tentative agenda for Wednesday:

15 min - intro to web mapping technologies
10 min - Mapbox (free) account setup
45 min - hands-on workshop with Mapbox Studio
45 min - hands-on intro to Mapbox GL JS and getting a working map
15 min - bring in GeoJSON data, misc. features

This is intended to be a working introduction to Mapbox tools, geared toward the beginning user. If y'all have any suggestions about what to present, please comment here.

[debboutr]

I'd enjoy seeing a time slider that could be used on point data (GeoJSON) if possible or with raster data as well, I might be working on a project soon that will model stream temp. in the columbia over time which would be displayed as raster. Excited about this one! Thanks

[vantuyls]

~8 attendees

[grovduck]

Talk for Mapbox: intro_to_mapbox.pdf
Tutorial 1: https://www.mapbox.com/help/create-a-custom-style/
Tutorial 2: https://www.mapbox.com/help/add-points-pt-1/
Tutorial 3: https://www.mapbox.com/help/building-a-store-locator/
Gist for dynamic earthquake viz: https://gist.github.com/grovduck/bee7638e3e0b935bf059d4cd4916acc8

[grovduck]

Another hint for you Python users that I found this morning. If you install both fiona and geojsonio, you can easily translate and view shapefiles as geojson:

fio dump /path/to/shapefile.shp | geojsonio

This opens your shapefile in a web browser and shows you the associated geojson. This question came up during the session.

[debboutr]

Another Python solution is to use the geopandas package, which can read in shapefiles and write-out geojson.

import geopandas as gpd

shp = gpd.read_file('/path/to/shapefile.shp')
shp.to_crs({'init': u'epsg:3857'},inplace=True) # if need to re-project
shp.to_file('path/to/geojson.json',driver="GeoJSON")

This will write the JSON straight to a file. You can also quickly, as seen above, change the projection, which for Mapbox, may not be imperative, but for other slippy maps, the 'WGS Pseudo Mercator' projection is needed. You can also use the extension '.geojson' on the file, it doesn't seem to matter, but will help identify the geo component when sifting through files.