Western Ghats ESA Atlas

Using the data programmatically

The API is a tree of static JSON files served over HTTPS with Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *. You can call it from a browser, a notebook or another website with no key, no sign-up and no rate limit.

It is read-only and addressed entirely by path. There are no query parameters, because there is no server — filtering happens on your side, after you fetch. In exchange you get something that cannot go down under load, cannot rotate a key on you, and is cached on a CDN.

Base URL:

https://nikunjfriends25-droid.github.io/western-ghats-esa/

Endpoints

Bulk geometry

Whole-state GeoJSON, Shapefile, KML and CSV are plain files under downloads/ — fetch them the same way. The merged full-resolution GeoPackage is attached to the latest release rather than served here.

Overlaying the ESA on your own map

Three levels of detail, so you can pick the lightest thing that answers your question.

Every one of these returns valid GeoJSON, so it drops straight into MapLibre, Leaflet, OpenLayers, Mapbox, QGIS or GeoPandas with no conversion.

MapLibre or Mapbox:

const base = 'https://nikunjfriends25-droid.github.io/western-ghats-esa/';

map.addSource('esa', { type: 'geojson', data: base + 'api/v1/outline.json' });
map.addLayer({ id: 'esa-fill', type: 'fill', source: 'esa',
  paint: { 'fill-color': '#2f6d3a', 'fill-opacity': 0.35 } });
map.addLayer({ id: 'esa-line', type: 'line', source: 'esa',
  paint: { 'line-color': '#1d4a25', 'line-width': 1.2 } });

Leaflet:

fetch(base + 'api/v1/geometry/KL.json')
  .then(r => r.json())
  .then(gj => L.geoJSON(gj, {
    style: { color: '#2f6d3a', weight: 1, fillOpacity: 0.3 },
    onEachFeature: (f, l) => l.bindPopup(f.properties.gz_village)
  }).addTo(map));

QGIS — add these as a vector layer straight from the URL (Layer ▸ Add Layer ▸ Add Vector Layer ▸ Protocol: HTTP), or in the Python console:

iface.addVectorLayer(
    "https://nikunjfriends25-droid.github.io/western-ghats-esa/api/v1/outline.json",
    "Western Ghats ESA", "ogr")

Intersect the ESA with your own points, in GeoPandas:

import geopandas as gpd
base = "https://nikunjfriends25-droid.github.io/western-ghats-esa/"
esa   = gpd.read_file(base + "api/v1/outline.json")
sites = gpd.read_file("my_sites.geojson").to_crs(esa.crs)
inside = gpd.sjoin(sites, esa, predicate="within")
print(len(inside), "of", len(sites), "sites fall inside the draft ESA")

Examples

One village, by 2011 Census code:

curl https://nikunjfriends25-droid.github.io/western-ghats-esa/api/v1/villages/626770.json

Every Kerala village that the gazette marks as bifurcated:

const base = 'https://nikunjfriends25-droid.github.io/western-ghats-esa/';
const kl = await fetch(base + 'api/v1/states/KL.json').then(r => r.json());
const partial = kl.rows.filter(r => r.bifurcated);
console.log(partial.map(r => r.gz_village));

Load a whole state into GeoPandas:

import geopandas as gpd
base = "https://nikunjfriends25-droid.github.io/western-ghats-esa/"
ka = gpd.read_file(base + "downloads/WG_ESA_2024_KA.geojson")
print(ka.area_km2.sum(), "km2 across", len(ka), "villages")

Total mapped area against what was notified:

curl -s https://nikunjfriends25-droid.github.io/western-ghats-esa/api/v1/summary.json \
  | jq '.states[] | {state, area_km2, notified_km2, ratio}'

Field reference

Stability & licence

Paths under api/v1/ are intended to stay put; a breaking change would appear as api/v2/. Data is released under CC BY 4.0, and derived from the MoEFCC draft notification S.O. 3060(E) (PDF, 4.9 MB) — attribute Western Ghats ESA Atlas, Nikunj Jambu and link back. The underlying government data remains under its own terms.