DEVELOPING A FRAMEWORK FOR FLYOVER COUNTY TO SUPPLEMENT DATA IN QUERIED REPOSITORIES

Flyover Country is an NSF-funded geoscience mobile app that serves as a tool for travelers to understand the landscape that they fly over, drive across, and hike through. The app loads geological points of interest along a user’s travel path from databases such as Macrostrat, Paleobiology Database (PBDB), Wikipedia, and more. Device GPS allows the app to show the user’s position relative to the displayed features. Large geologic features are often identified only with single point coordinates, resulting in users’ paths missing information for major regions that they are traveling through. For example, the Wikipedia article on the Rocky Mountains is geolocated near Aspen, CO, so even though the Rockies occupy nearly 1 million km², the user would only see the article if their flight path passed within 300 km of Aspen. A GeoJSON repository modified from Natural Earth (NaturalEarthData.com) has been added to the app’s queried databases so that mountain ranges, physiographic provinces, lakes, coasts, deltas, deserts, islands, and other features now display as polygons instead of single points. Using a polygon ensures that users passing through or over a region have access to the corresponding Wikipedia article. To further engage and educate the user, a script was written to query Wikipedia articles about the regions in the Natural Earth set. This method can also be modified to identify items from other databases that lack articles. For example, linking search terms with Wikipedia articles could be used to identify which fossil taxa stored in the PBDB or Neotoma do not have Wikipedia articles. These missing articles provide an opportunity for educators and researchers to address these gaps and actively contribute to information resources. By engaging the larger community and highlighting missing information, geoscientists will be able to better contextualize smaller or lesser known geologic points of interest, regions, and fossil taxa.