Demonstration of generating and serving static raster tiles with GDAL using Map of Biodiversity Importance (MOBI) data from NatureServe, (2022) https://www.natureserve.org/map-biodiversity-importance, original data files from https://geohub-natureserve.opendata.arcgis.com/search?q=mobi
Source: NatureServe Coverage: Contiguous United States (CONUS) H3 resolution: 8 (~0.74 km² per cell) Value range: 0–32 species per cell
The Map of Biodiversity Importance (MOBI) integrates NatureServe habitat models for ~2,400 imperiled and endemic species of vertebrates, invertebrates, and plants across the contiguous US. This layer — Species Richness (All Taxa) — reports the number of modeled species with predicted suitable habitat. The H3 hex layer has ~7.7 million non-zero cells (≈10.5 million total cells including richness 0) across CONUS.
The source raster (990 m pixels) is published as a WGS84 Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF and aggregated to H3 resolution 8 hexagons by area-weighted exact-extract with the max reducer: each cell stores the maximum modeled richness among the source pixels covering it (one row per cell). max is used because richness is a count of species present — the peak, not an average — so rollups to coarser resolutions take MAX, preserving biodiversity hotspots.
H3 Hex Parquet (Hive-partitioned by h0 cell):
https://s3-west.nrp-nautilus.io/public-mobi/mobi-species-richness-all/hex/h0=*/data_0.parquet
Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF (WGS84, for raster visualization via titiler / GDAL):
https://s3-west.nrp-nautilus.io/public-mobi/mobi-species-richness-all-cog.tif
This is a raster-derived layer (COG + H3 hex; no PMTiles). For web maps, serve the
WGS84 COG through a tile server such as titiler,
or render the H3 cells directly from the Parquet (e.g. with h3-js + deck.gl
H3HexagonLayer, coloring by species_richness).
Hamilton, H., Smyth, R. L., Young, B. E., Howard, T. G., Tracey, C., Breyer, S., Cameron, D. R., Chazal, A., Conley, A. K., Frye, C., & Schloss, C. (2022). Increasing taxonomic diversity and spatial resolution clarifies opportunities for protecting US imperiled species. Ecological Applications, 32(3), e2534. https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.2534
Partners: NatureServe, Esri, The Nature Conservancy, state natural heritage programs (NY, VA, PA, CO, FL, OR, MT, MI, WY and others). Computational support from Microsoft AI for Earth.