CliMAS is a group of three web tools presenting information about climate change and species adaptation. I joined the CliMAS project in late 2012, when the CliMAS projects were all due to be finished, but weren’t. They came together and ended up alright.

The three climas tools are:

CliMAS Reports

This tool is mainly for people who manage the natural resources and ecology of Australia. Using CliMAS Reports you select a particular region from the list of NRM (CMA) regions, IBRA regions, and States, and a future year you are interested in. Then the tool generates a report that describes the changes expected for your region’s climate and biodiversity.

I implemented CliMAS Reports from scratch in Ruby and Javascript. It takes climate and biodiversity data in JSON format, merges it into a cleverly written Markdown document, resulting in a nice printable report. Lauren Hodgson put the data together and wrote the conditional report text using the little Report Assembler I wrote for this project.

The report assembly and document formatting all happens in browser, and I used a print stylesheet to make the final report printable directly.

Data used for the project is downloadable in usable formats from the project site, and the source code is available from the source repository.

CliMAS Suitability and CliMAS Biodiversity

The other two CliMAS tools, CliMAS Suitability and CliMAS Biodiversity, let the user browse suitability maps for species projected in to various future climates, and see biodiversity measures for future climates at the class, family and genus levels.

These tools were partly implemented in PHP by the time I started on the project, and needed me to finish off the back end and make a UI. I used Leaflet for the map-displaying parts of these tools, and re-used a lot of the UI elements I made for CliMAS Reports.

The data used for these projects is downloadable in usable formats from the project site, and the source code is available from the source repository.

Time pressure was quite high on these and I don’t love everything about the final results, but I did manage to meet the project goals and get a nice consistent look across all three tools.