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A year in amphibians

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About the map

As the amphibians of Great Britain begin their lifecycles in early spring, we may be wondering what species we can expect to see pop up across the country.

This map reveals the seasonal patterns of sightings for seven of the most observed frog, toad and newt species. A hexagonal grid was used to aggregate the data and display it by month.

Why it works

Arcade calculations allowed data spanning over 50 years to be portrayed just in their respective month of the year. Combined with an interactive time slider, the aggregated data allows the user to explore broad seasonal variations by amphibian species.

The layered hexagons and green/blue colour scheme visually imitate frogspawn. The colour scheme is matched in the custom pop-ups, which include simple charts showing the underlying data.

Important steps

  • 3.

    Create a new field in the attribute table and use Arcade, in the Field Calculator, to sort and count concatenated records, before returning the most common species recorded. Also, use Arcade to extract the month recorded and create a new date field, with all records in one year.

  • 4.

    Present your data. Add Join to connect your summary statistics to a duplicate hexagon grid and time enable the layer. Use the Feature to Point tool to create midpoints in each hexagon to publish to ArcGIS Online.

  • 5.

    In the ArcGIS Online Map Viewer, upload custom images for the symbology and explore colour schemes, sizes and positioning to create a pond theme. The Arcade FeatureSet function lets you pull data from other layers into the popups.

  • 6.

    Use the ArcGIS Instant Apps Slider template to filter data through time. Enhance the presentation by using custom CSS to match the slider colour scheme to your symbology.

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Requirements

  • Data and software

    This map uses amphibian sightings from the iNaturalist, a community recording platform, records included in the ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World. The seven most commonly observed species were included:

    ·         European common frog

    ·         Marsh frog

    ·         European toad

    ·         Natterjack toad

    ·         Smooth newt

    ·         Palmate newt

    ·         Great crested newt

    The World Ecophysiographic Land Units, from the Living Atlas, was used to provide contextual land cover information.

  • Analysis

    Intersect, Spatial Join and Summary Statistic tools were used to obtain all sightings per hexagon, per month. Arcade was used in the Field Calculator to sort, count and find the most common species.

  • Time

    Processing and joining the datasets to hexagons took some time. The most time was spent writing Arcade code to calculate the modal species from concatenated data. After that, only a few days were required to enhance the symbology and customise the app experience.

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Tips and tricks

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    Hexagon tessellations

    Use the Tessellation tool to explore alternative ways of aggregating data.

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    Custom CSS editing

    Make your ArcGIS Instant App theme cohesive using custom CSS in the Theme & Layout settings. You can also alter the size, colour and appearance of features, such as the Slider.

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    Animated symbols

    Use animated symbols in ArcGIS Online to create ripple effects by changing the colour, visibility and transparency.

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Links & resources

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Ana Harcombe-Smee

Map Author

Ana Harcombe-Smee (She/her)

Ana is a Graduate GIS Consultant at Esri UK, with a background in GIS and Remote Sensing. When she isn’t counting frogs, you’ll find her baking or catching up with a coffee.

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