Last Stops

Overview

Last Stops is a travel planner targeted toward young adults who are concerned about future climate change impacts. This application, created for OSU's Visual Analytics course, combines a travel bucket list with climate predictions for sea level rise and wildfires. These predictions cover the mid to late 21st century and are displayed through map overlays, location filtering, and risk ranking.

This project is currently hosted on Vercel: https://last-stops-cs549.vercel.app/

Project Role

While I contributed to many aspects of this application, my main contributions were to the base map, fire data integration, and bucket list comparison visualizations. 

The map itself utilizes the AM Charts Map. After investigating other potential map widgets, I determined that this would be the best base for our application as it allowed for easy creation of different maps as well as pre-existing ways to create points and effects with said map. I created our U.S. map and also set up the code to add new maps on top of it and add new points to the map. This provided the framework for our application.

With the map on the page, I turned to integration of the fire data. The fire predictions were given as probabilities associated with pyromes (areas used to denote fire locations, shown on the left). However, these pyromes were given as a shape file so I needed to convert them to a GeoJSON and also update the coordinate reference system to match that of the main map. I then added the pyrome map on top of the U.S. map and color coded each one based on fire probability (darker = higher probability). Based on these probabilities, I then investigated how to find which pyrome each city is in so that the display can show the risk for each city in increasing order.

Finally, I created the visualizations for comparing bucket list destinations (shown bottom left). These visualizations can allow the user to determine which bucket list items to keep and what order to put them in.  Each color in the chart corresponds with the colored circle next to the place name. With more time, I would have liked to have these charts auto-scale the y-axis so they could be read easier. However, as this was created in a few weeks, I did not have the time

Video Demo