As I do with anything I come across, as soon as I discovered the California Coastal Trail, I googled “California Coastal Trail API”. I was pleasantly surprised to see that indeed there was one. The API is a simple web API for getting at the access locations, clean up locations, meetings, sea level rise, and critical areas maps. It isn’t a very sophisticated API, but that doesn’t matter. I am just happy that they have an API available for the data.

I am most interested n the locations data available via the API. The path has 1562 locations available which you can also pull by id. I am spending time getting to know the data via the Postman public workspace I setup for the API. I have also begun looking for other alternate data sources that I can overlay with the trail data to help enrich what is already available. I am looking to help build on what the commission has provided already.

The trail covers more territory than I first imagined, and the API provides access to more data than I imagined.. It offers sea level rise and other interesting data about the coastal communities in which the trails pass. I think next I will work to enrich the data about each city, so that I can overlay with event, restaurant, motel, RV park, and other relevant information to better support the data made available via the California Coastal Commission API.