Recommend a default map style and view

[gbif-portal]

Map improvement

I really like the map style on this page
https://www.gbif.org/occurrence/1457615639

it has more information and the occurrence location is clearly visible. However, the default map on this page:

https://www.gbif.org/species/1347327

Is not good. The occurrence spots are so small they are hard to see and the map has little to no information.

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fbitem-occurrence1457615639
Reported by: dssikes@alaska.edu
System: Firefox 54.0.0 / Mac OS X 10.10.0
Referer: https://www.gbif.org/occurrence/1457615639
Window size: width 1276 - height 675
API log
Site log
datasetKey: 50c9509d-22c7-4a22-a47d-8c48425ef4a7
publishingOrgKey: 28eb1a3f-1c15-4a95-931a-4af90ecb574d

[MortenHofft]

Thank you for your feedback

occurrence overlay on maps
I see your point that the default style for that species has too small points. I have changed the default to small hexagons.

Choosing a good default that works for all maps is tricky though. For Animalia the points are often better. It really depends on the data and what the user is interested in - densities or outliers fx.

The good thing is that it remembers your choice, so you only have to change it once.

base maps
As for the map (basemap with land mass and roads) we completely agree that it should have more details. We are working on that.

The issue we are facing is that we want to support other projections than the standard Square World one aka Mercator (which is the one used on occurrence pages). The downside of that projection is that it cannot show the whole world (arctic and antarctic is lost) and that it skews landmass (Greenland vs Africa is very much off).
And for those other projections there isn't really any maps we can use. So we have to build our own. That is something new we have started doing, and there is still some work to do. We do have a basemap with streets available:

Hope that helps. More base maps are on its way.

[MortenHofft]

Map detail issue https://github.com/gbif/maps/issues/19

[MattBlissett]

I have an idea for the occurrence default/recommended style.

I think if I generate a tile with plain red squares:

then by counting the total red area, and comparing it to the number of splodges, we can make a decent guess at a default.

I'd like to have a look at this next week.