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Sandbox Overview

The Sandbox is the main signature lookup tool: choose a place or a historical polity on the left, then read its environmental signature across six of the seven tabs on the right.

Choosing a place: Settlements vs. Polities

The left panel has two forks, plus a shared Reset button that clears everything back to a cold start.

Settlements resolves a place by name (optionally "Name, Country") or lat,lon coordinates via the World Historical Gazetteer, or loads one of four worked examples (Timbuktu, Kaifeng, Tbilisi, Santa Fe, San Francisco, each with a preset date range).

Note: you must zoom to the vicinity of the place you are seeking, in order to constrain results. Once a place is resolved you can accept or change defaults for:

  • Scope — Single basin (default; containing basin only), Buffer (all basins within a radius you set, default 100 km, aggregated into one summary), or Basin ring (the containing basin's immediate neighbors — not aggregated; Get signature loads the center basin, and each ring member on the map is individually clickable to load its own signature for comparison). Buffer changes what "the basin" means for every tab that follows, since it's a genuine aggregate across more basins than a single-basin query. Basin ring is different in kind, not just degree — it's a per-neighbor comparison tool, not an aggregation scope.
  • Level — L06 (16,397 basins globally) or L08 (190,675 basins) — a coarser vs. finer BasinATLAS resolution.
  • Signature bands — A (Physiographic), B (Hydroclimatic), C (Bioclimatic), D (Anthropocene), E (Coastality), and T (Temporal — LMR/HYDE/eVolv2k enrichment). Checking T reveals a from-year/to-year range to set the aggregation window for those temporal layers.

Polities: Either search the Seshat project's Cliopatria polities by name, or load one of six worked examples (Northern Song, Abbasid Caliphate, Tibetan Empire, Tang Dynasty, Pagan Kingdom, Qin — the last flagged "no LMR" since it predates LMR's 1 CE coverage start). Selecting a polity reveals two independent temporal controls: a time-slice slider with VCR-style transport controls (first/previous/play/next) for stepping through the polity's historical boundary changes, and — separately — a Band T from-year/to-year range (T is pre-checked) for the paleoclimate/land-use aggregation window. The two are partially linked: moving the slider changes which boundary is shown. Get Signature will resolve Band T values for the current polity time slice. Level and Bands otherwise work the same as Settlements.

For both forks, the Get signature button always fires the query for the current parameters.

The seven tabs

Map

Shows the basin boundaries for the current scope. Selecting a variable from the dropdown list paints all basins globally while focused on the current scope, providing useful context.

Signature

Lists every requested variable, organized into accordions by band.

Analysis

Auto-generated interpretation, not raw values: a basin-context table (upstream catchment area, distance to ocean outlet, drainage type), a local–upstream divergence table comparing "local" (s) against "upstream" (u) values for key variables, and a water-provenance classification — Endorheic, Coastal terminal, Exogenous water supply, Catchment-uniform, Local-dominant, or Undetermined (the last when the upstream catchment is too small at the current level to resolve distant sources — switching to L06 usually resolves it).

Seasonality

Plots monthly precipitation and temperature as both a histogram and a radial (polar) chart, with an auto-generated prose summary of the precip/temp phase relationship (e.g. Mediterranean-type anti-phase vs. monsoon-type co-incidence) and a stats table of derived seasonality variables (precip concentration, peak month, precip–temp phase offset).

Context

Answers "how typical is this basin?" — a table of global percentiles for seven key variables, computed two ways: against all basins worldwide, and against just the basins within a chosen radius (250/500/1000/2500 km, default 500) of this one — plus a map painting the mean value of a chosen variable across that radius. The two percentile columns can diverge sharply: a basin can be unremarkable globally but an outlier regionally, or vice versa.

Similarity

Paints every basin that satisfies all the tolerance conditions of a chosen regime lens — a non-compensatory conjunction, not a distance ranking. Four lenses are available: Precipitation regime, Temperature regime, Climate (precip + temp combined), and Terrain regime. Each lens exposes a subset of tolerance dials relevant to it (e.g. precipitation shape/annual total/amplitude for the precip lens; elevation/relief range for terrain), each a tight/default/broad three-way choice — there's no single strict/moderate/loose ladder across the whole panel, each dial is independently query-relative.

Atlas

The one tab that isn't about the currently-selected place — it's a standing world map of precipitation regime classification, viewable by Modality (Arid, Even year-round, One wet season, Two wet seasons, Undetermined) or Phase (which season the wet period falls in, e.g. "Mediterranean" = one wet season with cool-season rain).