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Layer Methodology

Pollinator Observations

Pollinator records packaged into a fast vector layer for habitat exploration.

Snapshot7 study areas

Map Role

Observed bees, hoverflies, and butterflies mapped as biodiversity signals.

What It Shows

This layer highlights observed pollinator activity across the study areas. It is useful for spotting biodiversity hotspots, stewardship corridors, and places where ecological monitoring is concentrated.

Sources

  • GBIF occurrence API
  • iNaturalist-backed observations used in the pollinator ETL

Method

  1. 1.Fetch occurrence records by study-area bounding box.
  2. 2.Keep pollinator groups such as bees, butterflies and moths, and hoverflies.
  3. 3.Normalize species, common name, pollinator group, date, and city fields.
  4. 4.Convert the normalized CSV to PMTiles and render as both heatmap and points.

Refresh Cadence

Snapshot ETL. Refresh when the pollinator crawl is rerun and the PMTiles asset is regenerated.

Coverage

Seven study areas with point observations and density rendering.

Key Fields

species

Scientific species name

common_name

Common name when available

pollinator_group

Group used for styling: bees, butterflies and moths, or hoverflies

observed_on

Observation date

city

Study area assigned by the ETL

Caveats

  • Like other community-science layers, density mainly captures observation effort plus ecological presence.
  • Study-area collection uses bounding boxes and can include edge effects near municipal limits.
  • No observations does not mean no pollinator habitat.