Time Lapse Hydrography – Tuolumne and Clavey Rivers 2012 with Temperatures from Center for Watershed Sciences on Vimeo.

Our office put out time lapse cameras and data loggers on many rivers in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains in an attempt to capture what flows result in what types of amphibian habitat, and how those change over time. My supervisor at the time, Joshua Viers, wanted to make these data into interactive visualizations that can help managers better understand river dynamics. And thus, Streamlapse was born.

The original code is a mashup of a few programming languages and tools – a function of this having been done with no funding and as quickly as possible when it was first done. Now, we do it more frequently and are updating the code to be easier to use internally and externally.

View all of the videos

View the Original Code

View Updated Code written by a coworker

View the upcoming code – StreamLapse as a web service.

View my video explainer on the technique