GloBI Explorer: Interactive Ecosystem Explorer

This project was developed by a team of students as part of the Indiana University Information Visualization 2015 MOOC.

Goals

The goal of GloBI Explorer is to design an engaging yet informative and effective, interactive visualization of the biotic interaction data in GloBI and to provide an educational resource in ecology and biodiversity for middle and high-school students.

Data

The data used in this project is based on the Global Biotic Interactions API, designed to provide access to interaction data for the purpose of integrating the data into wikis, custom webpages or other interaction exploration tools.

Tech Stack

This is a single page application using AngularJS and scaffolded with the Yeoman Angular Generator. The visualization component is built with D3.js and geospatial mapping provided by Leaflet.

Bootstrap is used for layout and LESS for CSS preprocessing.

Developing

To get started, make sure you have Node.js installed, then run the following (mac users throw a sudo in front of these):

npm install -g grunt-cli
npm install -g bower

Then cd to project directory and run:

npm install && bower install
grunt serve

This will install all the required dependencies and launch a static connect server for development.

To generate and preview the optimized build (i.e. all assets concatenated, minified, reved etc.) run grunt serve:dist.