A revised interactive overlay for Plan Your Visit Maps on NPS.gov
Published on: Tue Sep 05 2023
by Jake Coolidge, Web Cartographer
The new interactive overlay for Plan Your Visit maps on NPS.gov. Click to view a live example for Olympic National Park.
This week, we’re rolling out a major revision to the interactive points of interest we display on Plan Your Visit maps across NPS.gov. To underscore the significance of this revision, I’ll briefly touch on the recent history of this key map element and summarize the new features.
In 2019 we introduced a streamlined set of icons with crisp, well-formatted artwork in rounded black square shields. This replaced an older, space-intensive teardrop marker system we had been using since roughly 2014. The data for these points of interest came exclusively from the enterprise GIS points of interest dataset. A couple years ago we started mixing in content for the popups from the Structured Data system, maintained by web authors via the NPS.gov content management system. This content displayed for those points of interest that had been matched to a location in Structured Data.
New interactive overlay in a portion of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area
With this new revision, we’re providing a more consistent experience between NPS.gov maps and the NPS Mobile App. Every location that’s visible in the mobile app as a green pin is now displayed prominently in NPS.gov maps with a green marker symbol. Interpretive content and photographs from the NPS.gov Structured Data system display in the popups for each of these locations.
New interactive overlay and example popup content in a portion of Yosemite National Park
Importantly, these locations are complemented by additional data from enterprise GIS points of interest, which we style with dark grey markers. This blending of both datasets provides a rich picture of facilities and amenities across the NPS. We have also reconfigured the zoom-dependent display settings of these points of interest to reduce visual clutter. The previous version used small circle symbols at low zooms to convey the density of available points of interest that could be further revealed at higher zooms. User feedback indicated some confusion with this approach and we have removed it as a result.
We extend the display of Structured Data-based locations by assigning map symbols to them based on their list of amenities. We ranked each amenity, and for each location, we review its array of amenities and use its highest-ranking amenity as its map symbol. For example, a scenic viewpoint might also have parking and trash receptacle amenities associated with it, but we select the scenic viewpoint symbol.
New interactive overlay and example popup content in a portion of Great Smoky Mountains National Park
The text-variable-anchor property in Mapbox GL JS/MapLibre opens up possibilities for enriching the display of points of interest with text labeling. Now users have both the map symbol and its name to get a better impression of a location before clicking on its popup. We’ve styled these labels so that they resolve labeling conflicts with each other dynamically and maintain optimum visibility for park labels.
New interactive overlay and park labels in the area around the Presidio of San Francisco
This revision is a culmination of several interconnected efforts spurred on by feedback received and analyzed by the National Information Services Center in 2022. In the future we’ll complete the development of NPMap5, which will enable us to address issues with the appearance of the interactive overlay with an aerial imagery background. In the meantime, we’re excited to get this improvement out to the public! Below, we close out the post with some before/after images of Plan Your Visit maps on NPS.gov.
