This is a tool I wrote in Python using tkinter. It was for a project I worked on and the goal was to have all specific information about the project relevant fauna available in one view. Pressing an animal button in the left column will show the distribution map as well as seasonal, time of day and biome occurences.
The map data and overlays are collected from Map of Life. For this post, the information in the top row is not further specified for each animal for this example.
Together with that, I wrote a toolset in Python and C# to generate/convert/export the data to the proper format for this tool. As those are purely command-line tools, there are no visuals to show here.
Data
The data is handled separately from the tool and most of the UI is created in a dynamic way, based on available data.
- Animal buttons/icons:
- If an Icon is found, a button is generated for it, if the name starts with a proper category prefix.
- If an overlay map is found as well, it will be shown when pressing the button, otherwise a message “no overlay found” appears on the map.
- Seasonal/Type info
- This data is read from an excelsheet, when an entry for that animal exists
- The seasonal info is encoded in numbers to determine the start end season with optional breaks inbetween, to generate the white bars
- If no entry is found, the message “no entries found” is shown in the first row instead
- Biome info
- The overlay is currently in one color only and not separated by biome colors, as some colors proved to reduce the readability quite a lot
- That’s why the biome information is listed additionally. Together with that, a separate map is available to show the biome areas (currently not implemented in this tool version)