TerraPulse is a bilingual (English ⇄ 中文) multi-page interactive atlas of the world's iconic hiking trails — a 4D spatiotemporal GIS explorer that couples 3D terrain, satellite remote sensing, seasonal climate windows and live GIS analytics. Ten routes across six continents, all driven by one shared data model.
Six pages, one data model
- Home — an immersive landing with a 3D globe, a season spotlight and curated collections
- World Atlas — a digital-earth "beacon" explorer
- Trail Library — search, filter and sort across every route
- Trail Dossier — a full bilingual dossier per route (terrain, climate, hazards, logistics)
- 4D Analytics — heatmaps, scatter plots, league tables and a climate "face-off"
- Field Notes — method, data sources, glossary and credits
Highlights
- True bilingual switching — route names, stories, hazards and every interface label follow the visitor's language, persisted between visits.
- A live terrain console in every dossier — MapLibre GL renders real hillshaded terrain with the route as a glowing corridor, clickable waypoints, a DEM toggle and a "Fly Along" mode.
- Custom canvas visualizations — elevation profiles, climate curves and 4D heatmaps drawn from scratch, no charting library.
Tech
MapLibre GL JS · Three.js · Canvas · OpenStreetMap · Esri World Imagery · AWS/Copernicus DEM terrain tiles — every layer open and public, with a graceful fallback when tile servers are unreachable.