We’ve just released an exciting bundle of updates to Terraso Story Maps that add polish and flair to your stories and improve your story mapping experience.
Color me impressed: personalize your story maps with themes
Many of you have asked for the option to customize the visual appearance of your stories. With our new story map theme selector, you can choose among eight beautiful color palette options to bring character to your maps and make your narratives stand out against the background.
A big “thank you” to our friends at Paani Earth and ALDEA Foundation for suggesting this improvement.
Pinpoint your maps with coordinate search
Terraso Story Maps are stories about the land; often very specific places in the world. We’ve updated our search system to accept latitude and longitude coordinates, so you can specify the precise place you’d like to focus on in the environment.
Thanks to The Flow Partnerships for sharing their highly detailed restoration stories with us, which led to this update.
Published story maps are now even more focused on your story
Speaking of focus, we’ve continued in our quest to strip away distracting or unnecessary elements from Terraso Story Maps. In the previous update, we removed our site header from published story maps, so the very first thing your audience sees when they visit is your story. (Don’t worry; logged-in users will still have a pathway to edit their story maps from the published view.)
Faster, more inspirational, more stable Terraso Story Maps
Other benefits in this release include:
- Better performance for longer story maps: Users with especially long stories can count on a responsive experience
- Featured story maps: We highlight the best stories coming out of Terraso Story Maps so you can draw inspiration from the world’s best storytellers. Check your home screen and storytelling dashboard for new highlights.
- Stay signed-in: We addressed a problem some of you were facing with being frquently prompted to sign in once your browser window closed.
Thank you for continuing to tell your stories with Terraso Story Maps. Our goal is to provide environmentalists with a free, open-source, and powerful alternative to Esri and other commercial story-mapping tools; your continued engagement makes this journey possible. Terraso Story Map’s next update will include more improvements to the look and feel of the tool, as well as frequently-requested enhancements to data visualization and story map management.
Our latest featured story map: a community case for urban forestry
Want a community to rally behind an environmental project? Skip the planet-scale pitch and start local — that’s the lesson behind our latest featured story map. The Hull & East Riding Friends of the Earth‘s new project makes a case for urban forestry that any East Riding resident can feel in their own neighborhood: cooler streets, lower flood risk, cleaner air, better mental health, and thriving wildlife habitat.
Tree Stories: Why Trees Matter to Our Communities weaves data, media, and narrative together to prove the point — climate benefits are real, but it’s the neighborhood-level wins that get people planting. Take a look for yourself:
