A demonstration of this project was given at the BRC Recording Schemes Meeting held at Wallinford on March 9th 2024. These notes were created for that meeting to summarise the workflow for using this project to create an atlas website.
The main steps to create your own local atlas, hosted on GitHub, from a spreadsheet of biological records are:
- Fork the BRC GitHub project repository ('repo') into your own GitHub account.
- Set up 'GitHub pages' on your forked repo: this creates your website.
- Create, add and edit text configuration files to tailor the look of your website.
- Add any required resources, eg. a logo image.
- Use the utility on your new site to convert a spreadsheet of records into the mapping and charting data required by the site. These are generated on your own computer.
- Upload these data to your GitHub repo.
- Add any further configuration and files required for your site, taxon images, species accounts, web pages.
Whilst some of these steps were briefly described at the BRC recording schemes meeting, they are not yet documented. The intention is to document them fully here when a first release is nearing completion. At the time of writing (06/03/2024), this 'proof of concept' project only contains the most basic functionality. For example there is currently only hectad mapping on a national scale, but a first proper release will provide facilities to create atlases based on VC boundaries or custom boundaries and provide mapping at hectad, quadrant, tetrad and monad scales (conditional on site configuration).
Some links used at the recording schemes meeting: