free-transmission-wildlife
# AI-Assisted Transmission Line & Wildlife Analysis
An AI-assisted GIS application for analyzing the relationship between **electrical transmission infrastructure** and **wildlife / public-access lands** in California's San Joaquin Valley.
The project combines **GIS spatial analysis, DuckDB Spatial, MCP, LLMs, and custom web interfaces** to make spatial questions easier to ask and analyze.
## Use Case
Wildlife and environmental organizations may need to answer questions such as:
* Which transmission lines intersect wildlife lands?
* Which public-access lands are within 1 km of transmission infrastructure?
* How many transmission segments affect a particular area?
* Which areas may require further environmental review?
* What transmission infrastructure is closest to a protected or public-access area?
Instead of manually loading multiple datasets into a GIS application and constructing spatial queries, the system allows these questions to be expressed in natural language and translated into spatial analysis workflows.
## Screenshots
### Claude + MCP
### ArcGIS
### MapLibre
### Web Dashboard
## Why This Exists
Traditional GIS workflows are powerful, but spatial analysis often requires users to:
1. Find the appropriate datasets.
2. Load and inspect the data.
3. Understand coordinate systems.
4. Construct spatial queries.
5. Run geoprocessing operations.
6. Interpret the results.
This project explores a different interaction model:
> **Ask a spatial question → perform GIS analysis → receive an interpretable result.**
The goal is not to replace GIS software.
It is to explore how **AI can become an interface for spatial analysis**, while the underlying spatial operations remain deterministic and are executed by GIS-aware tools and databases.
## The Bigger Idea
This project explores the intersection of:
**GIS + Spatial Databases + AI + MCP + Custom Interfaces**
with the goal of building more accessible and automatable spatial-analysis workflows.
---
For installation instructions, see [`docs/installation`](docs/installation.md).
For the system architecture, see [`docs/architecture`](docs/architecture.md).
TDQS
Scored across 7 tools
The data tools are largely distinct, but the two intersection tools (get_list_of_hit_wildlife_from_transmission_lines and calculate_transmission_lines_intersection_with_wildlife) overlap in subject and could be misselected without careful reading. The two map instruction tools are clearly disambiguated by their explicit platform constraints.
Most tools follow a get_<description> snake_case convention, and the map tools use a clear platform suffix. The calculate_ prefix in calculate_transmission_lines_intersection_with_wildlife is a minor deviation, and get_list_of_hit_wildlife_from_transmission_lines is verbose, but overall the naming pattern is predictable.
Seven tools is a well-scoped, focused set for a specialized transmission/wildlife analysis dashboard. Each tool serves a distinct output need: summaries, intersection results, overlap metrics, chart guidance, and map guidance.
The set covers the core query needs (summaries, intersection list, overlap metric) and presentation needs (chart and map instructions). Minor gaps exist, such as no detailed feature-level retrieval for individual transmission lines or wildlife lands, but the surface is likely sufficient for a dashboard use case.