Creating a Public Map for Your Website

Many conservation organizations would like an interactive map of their properties on their website. Usually creating and maintaining such a map requires a lot of time and technical expertise. Since all of the data that you'd likely want on such a map is already in Landscape, wouldn't it be great if Landscape could generate that map and keep it updated for you? It can!

Making the Map Public

If you are an Administrator user in your Landscape account, go to Settings, then go to 'Account' > 'Public Map'.

The data that is shown on the public map is controlled by a query that you define. The built-in setting is to show all properties that you currently hold that are "countable." If you want to change the query, click the Edit view button in the menu and modify the query.

To enable your public map embed, check the box next to Enable Public Map in the menu.

Using the Map

To make the map available on your own website, you need to add a little bit of html code. Copy the code from the box and insert it on to a page on your own website. It will size itself to fill the size of the container in which you put it.

Styling the Map

If you'd like to customize the styling of your map, use the color swatches on the layer list and choose the basemap you'd like to use.

Formatting the Popup Window

When a user clicks on a marker or polygon, an informational popup window will appear. You can control what is displayed in the popup window in the Map Popup Editor. This editor behaves like the Report Template editor - simply click in the editor and start typing. You can format your text and add pre-defined data tags, or merge fields, from the data tags button on the editor's toolbar. 

Important: All the fields you want to use in the popup have to be returned by your query. Be sure to make all the fields used in the popup visible in the query results.

Styling the Embedded Map

The "src" field in the HTML embed can be customized to pass parameters to the public map. For example, if you wanted to have the map zoom to a particular property, you could add the "place" parameter to the end of the "src" field as a querystring:

src="https://landconservationsoftware.com/ls/#/maps/<account id>/<map id>?place=My Special Property"

To use the "place" parameter, the name you supply must match the name of a Property or Stewardship Site (depending on the source of your data) exactly.

Alernatively, you can also use latitude and longitude values and a zoom amount:

src="https://landconservationsoftware.com/ls/#/maps/<account id>/<map id>?lat=45.0&lng=-100.2&zoom=12"

With some fancy HTML programming, you could make these variables dynamic when your page loads, so you could provide people with hyperlinks that take them to a particular place on your map. This could be useful for project announcement emails, for example.