The Global Coal Terminals Tracker represents these terminals as squares, and these are not clustered, and there is the option to show other types of coal projects (coal plants, coal mines, and steel plants that use coal), and points for those are clustered. This was an attempt to try to make the coal terminals stand out more (by making them distinct), but also to make them more interesting by showing them in context. We’re definitely not wedded to the particular implementation here, and would love to see a better implementation than what we have.
For the coal terminals map, I think they do want to retain that only the terminals are visible on the initial load. Otherwise it seems like they're lost in the mix.
In all of our trackers that have multiple types of projects, each project uses a different shape (e.g., circle, triangle, square). But when initially loading, and even when starting to zoom in, these different shapes aren't apparent because most points wind up as part of a cluster. So I'm not sure it's accomplishing a lot to have these all as separate shapes.
For example, here's the Africa Gas Tracker: https://globalenergymonitor.org/projects/africa-gas-tracker/tracker-map/ We also have the same situation with other regional maps (Asia Gas, Europe Gas, and the set of Latin America maps) as well as multi-project maps such as the Global Gas Infrastructure Tracker.
If switching to circles, and using a capacity view, there's a challenge in that the capacities of different types of projects aren't directly comparable. (For example, MW of capacity for a power plant is a different kind of capacity than tons of natural gas for an LNG terminal.) We could come up with a way of scaling each type of point so that they all span a reasonable range of sizes on the map. Explaining what the sizes mean, though, would be harder to do in a legend if there are multiple types of things on the map.
mikelmaron
commented
1 year ago