I am pleased to share the outcome of my recent collaboration with Provita: a portal for biodiversity data in Venezuela.

The portal was created to make it easier to access data records of Venezuelan species on the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) platform, as well as data generated by Provita’s own projects. The goal is to make this information more widely available to researchers, students, and the general public.

Provita Geoportal at FOSS4G 2021, Buenos Aires, Online presentation slides

I am honored to have the opportunity to present the results of my latest project, the Provita Geoportal, at the Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G), Online the week of August 27 through October 3, 2021.

On this post, I describe the approach used by the Provita Geoportal to pre-generate map preview tiles using a serverless approach.

Why pre-generate tiles?

Traditionally, map tiles are generated dynamically (and cached) using a GIS server. This requires installation, monitoring and maintenance of some server capability, whether it is a physical server somewhere, a hosted virtual machine, or perhaps a container image hosted in some cloud service provider. A solution like this would most likely require hosting database management system as well. And we don’t want any of that!

On my previous post, I gave an overview of the Provita Geoportal from an end-user perspective. On this post, I describe the Admin functionality used by authorized Provita users to add and manage the site’s content.

I am pleased to announce the beta release of my latest volunteer project: the Provita Geoportal. In previous posts I discussed some of the design and implementation details of the project, but I was waiting for the public release of the product to share the end-user and admin functionality of the site.

The purpose of the Geoportal is to enable professionals, researchers, academics and the general public to find, pre-view and download geospatial data sets about Venezuela. These data sets are published by the Provita team and are associated with the organization’s mission and projects.

Here, I continue discussing implementation details of the Provita Geoportal. In my first post on the topic, I discussed the overall design of the Geoportal. I followed with a more detailed description focused on data organization and storage.

In this post (Updated Feb 17, 2021), I describe the approach used to provide an access control mechanism for Admin users to populate and maintain the content of the Geoportal.

This is a follow up to my earlier post discussing the design of a Geoportal for Provita. In that post, I mentioned that we use the serverless JAMStack approach, with no servers and no databases to monitor and maintain.

So, “without” servers or databases, how are we organizing and managing the data of the site?

In this post, I answer the question by describing the data organization and the storage aspects of the Geoportal.

Over the past few months, I have been working on a cool new project for the Provita folks.

Provita wants to maintain and publish a collection of geospatial data sets to enable researchers, 3rd party organizations, and casual users to have access to up-to-date Geographical Information Systems (GIS) data for supporting ecology, biodiversity, and environmental protection applications, studies and analyses.

In this post, I introduce key project requirements and the overall design of the app.

Back in September, I described the deployment details of the Venezuelan Red List of Ecosystems site (Libro Rojo de los Ecosistemas Terrestres de Venezuela).

In this post, I discuss the approach I used for content management.

Deploying the site

In March (wow, it feels like eons ago!), I posted a discussion on the design of the Venezuelan Red List of Ecosystems site (Libro Rojo de los Ecosistemas Terrestres de Venezuela).

In this post, I describe how the project is deployed in production using Netlify.