Earlier this year, Stamen collaborated with the NYU WILD Lab to design and build the Urban Wildlife Atlas, a map-centered tool that establishes baseline information about NYC’s built environment, natural environment, and wildlife. The WILD Lab – housed within NYU’s Wild Animal Welfare Program – is a research and outreach initiative aimed at improving the welfare of wild animals in urban environments through scientific research, policy development, and public engagement.
When first discussing our collaboration, the WILD Lab sought to create a tool that brought together existing publicly-available spatial data in New York City related to urban wildlife and the local environment. While all of this data was available individually from various sources, no tool existed that combined them to showcase the complexity of the landscape in this way.
To take that a step further, we wanted to elevate our users’ experience by ensuring these many layers would work well together. Often, map tools with many data sources use software default styling, leaving the user with some work to do to create a beautiful, usable map.
With the Urban Wildlife Atlas, the public has a place to explore dozens of wildlife species living in New York City alongside elements of their habitats that impact their quality of life. The user can explore what interests them by toggling layers on and off or finding interesting combinations of layers that seem relevant for their species of interest. The Atlas also provides a handful of curated case studies that outline how changes to their environments impact wildlife species in the city.
Curious to know how we designed and built this tool? Keep reading! 👇
Interface
The NYU WILD Lab is a relatively new initiative with strong branding in its proposal and policy materials, which left us with a lot of room to explore visual design options for the Atlas. We wanted the tool to feel sleek, modern, and fun to invite users to engage with it and learn more about their local environment. The Atlas has two display modes and works on mobile devices as well.
The Atlas is designed with the public in mind as its primary user. Our main goal was to encourage user exploration of datasets without identifying explicit relationships between variables. Wild animal welfare is a multifaceted area of study that focuses on an animal’s quality of life. Sightings of species may indicate something about their quality of life, but data here is not yet granular enough to make those connections. The Atlas is meant to provide a baseline understanding of where species are and what may impact them, upon which researchers and citizen scientists can build in the future.
For cases where research supports known relationships between species and environmental variables, we have case studies that guide the user through the relationships at play. For example, Eastern gray squirrels prefer some street tree species over others, and some nuts they prefer to store (“cache”) while they prefer to eat others immediately.
Data
Most data in the Atlas is open source and/or crowdsourced, with most built and natural environment datasets provided by NYC Open Data and NYC Planning and wildlife observations from iNaturalist. OpenStreetMap data supplements where official datasets are not available for features like waste receptacles and light sources. At Stamen, we often use open source data and are particularly experienced in combining these sources to build a more complete map. OpenStreetMap is one of the easiest ways to fill in where other sources are lacking.
Wildlife data featured in the Atlas is from 2020-2025, with the top ~100 species observed in the five boroughs included. Each point on the map represents a single research-grade sighting for that species. Species are searchable and filterable by taxon for easier navigation. Clicking on a point will show an image and brief summary of the species, also provided by iNaturalist.
Natural environment data includes features like street trees, parks, and wetlands. As you may expect, many wildlife species observations are more prevalent in areas with greenspace:
Built environment data includes non-natural features in the urban landscape, such as land use, zoning, waste receptacles, and light sources. Understanding how spaces are being used and maintained can provide useful indicators of impacts on wildlife wellbeing.
Tech stack and workflow
In a traditional structure, a designer would wireframe and mock up the interface for a tool, while a developer would build the back end and development environment. When design is “done”, the developer would build out the interface based on the designs. This workflow may work for some projects or teams, but we prefer a much more collaborative and iterative approach throughout a project at Stamen.
Here, for example, Eric was gathering, processing and adding data to the map while I worked through the tool’s user flow and visual design. Once the data was ready, I started experimenting with various attributes to style the data in our development environment while Eric brought the interface to life on the front end. This back-and-forth approach allows us to work quickly and ensures we are always on the same page about what needs to happen to go from design to production.
Since we work in this iterative way, it was important to be able to preview data easily while setting up styling logic in Mapbox GL and designing the Atlas’ custom basemap in Mapbox Studio. We used pg_tileserv to generate previews of each vector dataset showing all of the features and available attributes on one map. Most of the NYC Open Data layers have many more attributes than we ended up needing for the Atlas, which made this approach incredibly valuable as we worked through the cartographic design process.
Despite NYC’s relatively small total area, many of the datasets from NYC Open Data are large and detailed enough that we took extra steps to ensure they rendered quickly and smoothly. For large vector data, we used PMTiles to ensure good performance without dropping features when generating vector tiles. For raster data, we use TiTiler to load cloud-optimized geotiffs (COGs), which can be rescaled and restyled on the fly as needed.
What comes next
What you see here is only the first release of the Urban Wildlife Atlas. We have plans to include more data in upcoming releases, including critical environmental factors like temperature, noise, and vehicle/pedestrian traffic. There will be additional case studies for other species/environment interactions in the coming months.
Stamen is planning a webinar this fall about maps, data viz, and interactive experiences related to ecology and the natural environment. If you’re interested in joining us or learning more, enter your contact info below!
Author’s note: Content in this blog post was originally scheduled to be presented at State of the Map US 2026. Unfortunately, due to travel issues, we were unable to attend and present this work then. I’m happy to be able to share our experience with NYU Wild Lab at last!