All the rivers (Australia)

Got a decent looking work print of a map of all the Australian rivers, as inspired by Chad Ajamian’s map. It’s on Imgur as a JPG, wordpress.com seems to have done a reasonable job with the full PNG, compressed it better than I can (!).

I produced this in TileMill, using data imported to PostGIS with ogr2ogr. I hoped to use the new MapBox Studio but it’s kind of a pain. Working with local data sources is awkward and there’s no simple exporting to a hires image. TileMill still gets the job done, what a champ! QGis also works and is faster (caching?), but its pixel rendering isn’t as beautiful as TileMill’s.

Map is styled on two parameters. Color is brown or blue depending on whether the stream is perennial, line width varies by UpstrGeoLn, the length of all line segments that contribute to this line segment. That’s not a bad proxy for stream importance, actually, I’m using it in lieu of Strahler number. I like the results.

Here’s the relevant part of the TileMill style sheet.

#streams2[perennial="Perennial"] {
  line-color: @stream;
  line-width: 0.5;
  [upstrgeoln > 10000] { line-width: 1.0; }
  [upstrgeoln > 100000] { line-width: 1.5; }
  [upstrgeoln > 1000000] { line-width: 2; }
}