Big River - The Project To Go With The Trip

Once I had decided to make the trip down the river I thought it would be interesting and useful to have an Amazonian themed maps and data project. A couple of years ago, in FOSS4G in Florence, I attended a presentation about TerriaMap and it ticked a lot of the boxes for a plan I had to do an open data and maps catalogue for Madrid and possibly other regions of Spain.

I had installed the tool and done some fairly basic experiments - but with the Amazon journey already being booked the focus changed and I embarked on a possibly over ambitious attempt to combine multiple data sources for the whole Amazonia region. That means a significant part of Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela and Bolivia. The project is online at Big River although for the moment it contains mostly base cartography sourced from national mapping agencies.

A lot of OSM data is in the queue to be loaded, already there in the case of Peru, and the first cross frontier thematic dataset covering the frightening wildfire season of 2024 across the entire Amazonian region is also in the pipeline. There’s a huge amount of open data available and work on the project will continue - but first I have to get down the big river!