19 Apps
The MST has one interactive application, the Atlas (marinesensitivity.org/atlas/?ver=v6). It replaces the two Shiny apps (Scores and Species) that came before it; those are retired and described, for the record, under Section 19.2 below and in the Legacy appendix.
These tools allow stakeholders, scientists, and decision-makers to understand the underlying components contributing to an area’s sensitivity to offshore energy development, supporting better planning and impact assessment.
The Atlas renders any published release rather than shipping a per-version fork. The version is data, settled by the release’s published manifest, so a fix reaches every version at once. On the public host the release is a query parameter (?ver=v3); a restricted pre-release is reached only through the signed-in preview host, where the version is the URL path (/v9/atlas/). The release picker in the app’s top bar moves between them. See Chapter 21.
19.1 The Atlas
The Atlas is a static web app (Svelte and MapLibre) with no application server of its own: the Scores lens’s cell and area clicks, flowers, tables and reports are computed in your browser by a DuckDB-WASM instance that queries the release’s published Parquet directly over HTTPS. What a browser cannot compute itself comes from services that are not Atlas-specific: score and species map tiles from the project’s titiler (which range-reads the release’s Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFFs, and also answers a species click and the legend’s histogram), zone outlines and species range inputs from static PMTiles archives, and the basemap from CARTO.
It has two lenses, switched from the top bar, and four tools on its rail, the same in both lenses — Layers, Details, Table and Report:
- Scores lens — composite and per-category sensitivity, mapped as the 0.05° cell grid or aggregated to BOEM Program Areas (Planning Areas for v1), with a flower plot and a component table (in Details) and a species table for the selected cell or area.
- Species lens — individual and merged distribution models with their contributing input datasets, regulatory status (ESA listing, IUCN Red List category, MMPA and MBTA protection) in the Details tool. Search by common or scientific name.
- Places (the first part of the Report tool) — outline any area of interest (pick a Program Area or a gazetteer place, draw a shape, type coordinates, or upload a file) and get the same scores and species results, shareable entirely through the URL.
- Report — a printable, downloadable document (print, HTML, ZIP or Word) for any place.
Chapter 21 is the full walkthrough, including how a drawn place is encoded in a shareable link, and the Atlas user guide steps through the app’s own guided tour one control at a time.
Deep links carry their state in the URL. lens=species opens the Species lens, sp= selects a species, and the Atlas rewrites the older mdl_key and mdl_seq parameters to sp when it loads, so a link made for either Shiny app, or printed in an earlier report, opens the same species.
19.1.1 How the Atlas draws a release
Three kinds of map layer, each resolved from the release’s manifest rather than hardcoded, make the Scores lens:
- Score raster — a pre-rendered COG per metric × subregion, whose URL and rescale range come straight from the release manifest and which titiler turns into small tiles on request. The browser fetches only the tiles intersecting its viewport; no full raster is transferred on load.
- “Cells outside Program Areas” mask — a single-color overlay published the same way.
- Zone choropleth — polygon geometry from a static PMTiles archive published per geometry vintage, with each zone’s fill color computed in the browser from the release’s per-zone scores.
Because every one of those is resolved from the manifest, switching the release switches all three together, including drawing the boundary vintage that release actually used. Chapter 13 shows the serving architecture these layers sit on, and how COGs and PMTiles are produced and published; its diagrams were drawn when the Shiny apps were the clients, so where they show a Shiny server, the Atlas now does that work in the browser.
19.2 Retired: the Scores and Species Shiny apps
Until October 2026 the MST’s interactive tools were two R Shiny apps, each rendering any published release from the URL path:
- Scores — composite and per-category sensitivity by Program Area or cell, with flower plots, treemaps and species tables (Appendix B).
- Species — individual and merged distribution models with regulatory status (Appendix C).
The Atlas does what both did and adds Places. The Shiny apps are no longer reachable, and every URL they answered at (app.marinesensitivity.org/{ver}/scores/, /{ver}/species/, the older ?ver=, mdl_key and mdl_seq query forms, the retired /mapgl and /mapsp aliases, and the same paths on the preview host) is redirected (HTTP 302 for now; the public redirects become permanent 301s once the Shiny services are removed) to the equivalent Atlas view with its query carried; a restricted release’s URLs go to its Atlas on the preview host. Links in earlier reports, including the URLs printed in the BOEM final report, therefore keep working. The apps’ source remains in the apps repository, and their documentation is kept in the Legacy appendix: Appendix B, Appendix C and their step-by-step guide.
19.3 Legacy Applications
Earlier prototype applications from the research phase are kept in the Appendix under Applications (Legacy) for reference, alongside the retired Shiny apps. They are not part of the current serving path.