MapView#

MapView is the dedicated map workbench of pyCSAMT: a Dash/Plotly browser application focused entirely on seeing a survey in space — basemap station maps, profile overlays, Surfer-style contours, and interactive 3-D resistivity scenes with fence sections, blocks, depth slices, iso-surfaces, and draped topography. It is the point-and-click layer over the Python mapping API: everything the app draws comes from the same MapView façade you can drive from code, so a scene you build here can be reproduced exactly in a script.

Explore the Guide#

Pick a page to dive in. A good first pass, in order, is Installation → Loading & Sessions → Views & Controls → Exports → Troubleshooting.

Installation

Install the app extra, launch pycsamt-mapview, and learn the host/port/data/debug options.

Installation And Launch

Loading & Sessions

Load EDI survey lines, import ModEM inversion results, and the per-tab session cache.

Loading Data And Sessions

Views & Controls

The Map and 3-D views and every control in the inspector — basemaps, contours, fence/block/depth/iso.

Views And Controls

Exports

Export the current view as interactive HTML, or reproduce it from code with pycsamt.map.

Exports

Troubleshooting

Ports, blank 3-D scenes, coordinate systems, and large-survey performance.

Troubleshooting

When To Use MapView#

MapView is the right surface when the spatial picture is the point:

place a multi-line survey on a satellite, street, topographic, or light/dark basemap and confirm its geometry;
colour stations by index, elevation, apparent resistivity, phase, or skin depth, and drape a Surfer-style contour over the basemap;
build an interactive 3-D scene — fence panels along each line, a filled block, depth slices, or iso-surfaces — with topography and a resistivity visibility band to isolate conductive or resistive structure;
drop a ModEM 3-D inversion result into the same scene as the survey geometry and inspect the model in place.

For per-station response curves, pseudosections, QC, corrections, and modelling, use the web app or the desktop GUI. MapView deliberately does one thing — space — and does it well.

The Two Views#

Everything in MapView lives under two views, switched from the left rail:

Map — the 2-D basemap view: stations, profile lines, contour overlay, basemap, and coordinate system.
3-D — the interactive resistivity scene: fence, block, depth-slice, and iso-surface renderings with topography and depth/resistivity filters.

Both views read the same loaded survey and the same line selection, so switching between them never changes what is selected — only how it is drawn.

Run MapView#

pycsamt-mapview

The launcher starts a local Dash server on http://127.0.0.1:8770 and opens the app in the default browser. The module form works everywhere the package is importable:

python -m pycsamt.app.mapview

Useful launch options:

pycsamt-mapview --no-browser
pycsamt-mapview --port 8780
pycsamt-mapview --host 0.0.0.0
pycsamt-mapview --data path/to/edi_folder
pycsamt-mapview --debug

--data preloads an EDI folder (one or more survey lines) so the app opens with the survey already on the map. See Installation And Launch for the full option list.

Main Concepts#

Concept	Meaning In MapView
Survey lines	Named groups of stations (one folder or filename prefix per line), toggled from the line picker; the selection applies to both views.
View	Map (2-D) or 3-D — the two ways MapView draws the same survey.
Colour field / overlay	The quantity drawn on the map: station index, elevation, apparent resistivity, phase, or skin depth.
Contour overlay	A Surfer-style filled/line contour draped over the basemap.
3-D mode	Fence, Block, Depth slices, or Iso-surface — how the 3-D scene renders the resistivity volume.
Resistivity band	A ρ visibility window that isolates the conductive or resistive part of the 3-D volume.
Inversion result	A ModEM 3-D model folder imported and shown in the survey’s own scene.
Session cache	Loaded data held per browser tab on the server; the app never writes into your data folders.