Where the pins come from
Rally reads NASA GLOBE Observer participatory science records so the map is useful before the first resident ever opens it. The scoring rule is printed here rather than hidden, so anyone can audit it — including the part where the coverage is thinner than anyone would like.
lib/globe.js calls the open GLOBE search API — no key, no account — and the 6 standing water sites on the map are verbatim records from it, coordinates, dates and larvae counts included. The 12 resident reports and every event are still demo state, held in React and cleared by a reload.The three layers
GLOBE Observer
Mosquito Habitat Mapper records: someone found standing water, logged where it was, and reported whether larvae were present. Collected through NASA's GLOBE Observer app and read straight from the public search API.
Resident reports
Filed inside Rally, in the same shape as layer 1 so both render identically: coordinates, type, one line of description, timestamp. These are still seeded examples — nothing persists until a store is wired up.
Events
Derived, never collected. An event inherits coordinates, issue type and suggested supplies from the pin it came from. The organizer adds only a time.
How thin the GLOBE layer is here
Alachua County has six Mosquito Habitat Mapper observations across nine years: three from two days in August 2019 and three from one afternoon in January 2026, clustered around UF campus and southwest Gainesville. All six are still water, and not one has a positive larvae count. So every “larvae confirmed” pin you see on the Gainesville map is a resident report, not a GLOBE record.
That is not enough to seed a county map on its own, which is why GLOBE runs here as a sparse supplementary layer over resident reports rather than as the primary source. Widening the bounding box is four numbers in lib/geo.js, and the counts below are what each choice would buy.
- Alachua County
- 6 records in the whole archive
- North Florida
- 15 records in the whole archive
- Florida
- 634 records in the whole archive
- Southeast US
- 1,163 records in the whole archive
- Publication lag
- Roughly six months. This is an archive, not a live feed, and nothing from it is labelled current conditions.
How priority is scored
Larvae confirmed
An observer sampled the site and found larvae, so it is actively producing mosquitoes. These are the pins worth a Saturday.
Water logged, no larvae found
Standing water was recorded but no larvae were found, or no sample was taken at all. Still worth clearing — this is the cheapest point to intervene.
Last observed over a year ago
The site may have resolved on its own. Kept on the map, ranked below anything current.
Staleness is checked before anything else, so a year-old larvae confirmation scores low rather than high — sending volunteers to a site that has probably dried up is worse than not ranking it at all. Scores are computed against a fixed as-of date rather than the wall clock, so the same input gives the same output on the server and in the browser.
Cleaning rules
- No coordinates
- Dropped. A site nobody can find is a site nobody can fix.
- Coordinates out of range
- Dropped as entry errors.
- Blank larvae count
- Kept as blank, never coerced to zero. A blank means the observer did not sample, not that the site is clear — zeroing it would understate the risk. Three of the six GLOBE records here are blanks.
- Applied to the current set
- 18 of 18 records kept, 0 dropped. The rules run in the app rather than in a notebook, so what is displayed cannot drift from what was cleaned.
Current configuration
- Region
- Gainesville, Florida (Alachua County bounding box)
- Bounding box
- 29.4239 to 29.9458 lat, -82.6595 to -82.0555 lng
- Map centre
- 29.6516, -82.3248 · zoom 13
- GLOBE sites on the map
- 6 — the complete Alachua County archive, 2017 to 2026
- Data as of
- 2026-09-20
- GLOBE protocol
- mosquito_habitat_mapper
- GLOBE API base
- https://api.globe.gov/search/v1 (open, no key required)
Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) Program, accessed 2026-09-20, globe.gov, Mosquito Habitat Mapper protocol. Change the bounding box and this runs anywhere with GLOBE coverage — see the report directory for what is open right now.