Even without a requirement to stay particularly up to date, the size of the datasets makes working with OpenStreetMap reasonably complicated.
I needed tiles in non-web-standard projections: equirectangular and polar (EPSG:4326, 3575 and 3031). ESRI used to provide equirectangular tiles[0], but have deprecated the service. Polarmap have an Arctic map, but only at standard resolution [1]. I couldn't find an Antarctic map.
With a fair amount of fiddling, and building on the work OpenMapTiles.org have done, it was possible to generate the tiles, but I now realise why few people have attempted this: it requires a lot of processing power, technical ability to get everything working properly, and cartography to have a map that looks good (not just the final styling, but the choice of what data is present in each layer of vector tiles).
I met the minimum of what we needed [2], but I need to find more time to do the rest -- like contours.
I needed tiles in non-web-standard projections: equirectangular and polar (EPSG:4326, 3575 and 3031). ESRI used to provide equirectangular tiles[0], but have deprecated the service. Polarmap have an Arctic map, but only at standard resolution [1]. I couldn't find an Antarctic map.
With a fair amount of fiddling, and building on the work OpenMapTiles.org have done, it was possible to generate the tiles, but I now realise why few people have attempted this: it requires a lot of processing power, technical ability to get everything working properly, and cartography to have a map that looks good (not just the final styling, but the choice of what data is present in each layer of vector tiles).
I met the minimum of what we needed [2], but I need to find more time to do the rest -- like contours.
[0] http://server.arcgisonline.com/arcgis/rest/services/ESRI_Str...
[1] https://webmap.arcticconnect.org/polarmap.js/examples/PolarM...
[2a] Small demo: https://api.gbif.org/v2/map/demo7.html (shows northern fulmar seabirds)
[2b] An overview of the tiles: https://tile.gbif.org/ui/
[2c] In production https://www.gbif.org/species/2481433 (click to change the projection)