MOL Blog

A quick Map of Life update as we head into the winter holidays. The big news is that you now have much more control over the look and feel of the maps via layer styling! Lets take a peek how that works. Select a taxon, say, something winter holidayish like this: http://www.mappinglife.org/Rangifer_tarandus. Or if you prefer to not be reminded about wintery cold, take a look at geographic information for the Eastern Yellow-Billed Hornbill (http://www.mappinglife.org/Tockus_flavirostris.

In the layers widget, you can style all to one color by selecting “style all” or you can individually edit the style of a layer by selecting the left-most icon, which is a symbol showing the layer “view”. For points, it default to a red dot, for others a solid fill color. When you click it, a layer styling pop-up box will appear where you can select a fill color, border, width and opacity. For range maps, where there are many colors representing different part of a species range, you can select each color separately. Take a look especially at the gridded survey for the Eastern Yellow-Billed Hornbill ,and try changing the color and add a one pixel border – its a nice way to really bring that kind of data forward on the map. Try it out, tell us what you think! We’ve been thinking about this one for a long time and so great to have it finally available for you to use!

More next year! Your Map of Life Team.