Updated documentation can be found on the Wiki for the WDPA Release.
The WDPA is uploaded to AWS S3 on a monthly basis (though sometimes more often) by the Protected Areas team at UNEP-WCMC. It's stored as a File Geodatabase, which means we have to do some conversions before we can use the data in the application.
NOTE: none of the following steps are required to install or setup the application.
In the Rails console, run the following:
ImportWorkers::S3PollingWorker.perform_async
This downloads the WDPA, imports it to your local PostgreSQL install and creates the appropriate Rails models for the Protected Areas.
Some attributes (wikipedia summaries, etc.) take some time to generate and so depend on Sidekiq workers to be calculated. Thus having a Redis server running is a requirement so that these jobs can be queued -- see the workers docs for more info.
The WDPA is imported in to the Rails database (e.g. pp_development)
and consists of three tables: polygon, points and source. Although these
aren't used in the general running of the application, they are kept so
that we can generate downloads with the WDPA Data Standard without
having to re-transform the data back to how it started.
You can find more info in the download documentation.
Map tiles are stored and rendered by CartoDB. Due to the complexity of running this, there is no easy way to render tiles for your local dataset, and so locally you will render the same tiles that are run in production -- thankfully you are unlikely to find this a problem.