This project tells the story of glacial relicts and climate change refugia, focusing on changes since the last glacial maximum in North America and an endangered plant called Leedy’s roseroot. It was built using ArcGIS StoryMaps and ArcGIS Pro, with graphics drawn digitally on an iPad using the Procreate app. I wanted the look to evoke an explorer’s or botanist’s field journal, with hand sketched maps and illustrations mixed with loose splashes of watercolor.
To create the opening ice animation, I drew each frame (33 total) by hand, which took a bit of time. To help make things a little less tedious, I downloaded ice sheet data from this GitHub repo and used a Map Series in ArcGIS Pro to quickly create guides for each frame. Each one features a different shapefile showing the ice at a different point in time, with 500-1000 year jumps from one to the next. From there it was simply a matter of loosely tracing each image onto a different layer in a Procreate project, and using the app’s basic animation tools to put them all in motion.
Pro-tip: You can import a bunch of files into a Procreate project as individual layers all at once by opening up the Files app in side-by-side mode with Procreate, selecting all of your images, and dragging them over into the Procreate window. Much faster than using Procreate’s import option, which is one file at a time!
For every drawing—I used the standard 6B pencil and a custom watercolor brush inspired by the one in this video, with a few additional tweaks. And of course a good cold-press paper texture to really sell things.
Regarding the colors, red/green schemes should typically to be avoided on maps and data visualizations due to their accessibility issues. I kept those limitations in mind throughout the project and tried to avoid relying on color as the sole differentiator between types of data—making the colors enhancive, but not integral to understanding. The built-in, color-blind render options in Google Chrome were helpful for checking myself as I went. Despite the inherent challenges, I thought a red/green color scheme would both fit well with the topic and give it a vibrant, garden-y feel, while the strong contrast between red and green would enhance the information for the majority of readers. Green paired with an icy blue might’ve been the more intuitive choice, but it also felt a bit cliché and unexciting, and didn’t offer as good of a contrast for unimpaired readers, while being completely indistinguishable to blue-yellow colorblindness. And frankly, I was also just a bit tired of using blue in so many projects. Those were my reasons, and I’ll let you decide if it works or not.
Some of the interactive maps take advantage of “media layers” in ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS StoryMaps, so while you can pan around them a get pop-ups like normal web maps, they’re really just static images I drew with no actual spatial component.
Other than that, the bulk of this project was reading and research—the majority of which is credited at the end of the StoryMap, though there were many more papers and article I read which I did not directly reference. It was a fascinating topic to learn about and I hope it gets others interested in these rare plants and unique microclimates, too.