[pheelicks]

Yes, those are the obvious ones. This example: https://a5geo.org/examples/airbnb shows why the equal area is valuable in practice, while https://a5geo.org/examples/area shows the area variation vs h3.

The downsides are the characteristics that make h3 or s2 useful. For h3, the single neighbor type means it is well suited to flow analysis and S2 having exact cell subdivision means it is great for simplifying geometry.

However, there a number of use cases where choosing a spatial index is a more stylistic choice, like for visualization.

The aim of A5 is not to replace S2/H3 but rather to offer an alternative that has different strengths and weaknesses compared to existing solutions

[carderne]

Haha that colour scale on the area variance page makes it a bit hard to see whether nearby H3 hexagons are very different in size...? I've never really investigated, but my baseless assumption was that nearby hexagons (at a high zoom level) would be pretty similar size? But maybe that's completely wrong.

But yeah, will definitely reach for A5 at some point just for the aesthetics!

My favourite DGGS (this is a new term to me) is water basins as created by HydroSheds [1]. Different area, unpredictable shape, basically no usefull properties but they conform to topography! Can get a feel for them with this little thing I made several years ago [2] (your Cells example reminded me of this).

[1] https://www.hydrosheds.org/

[2] https://water.rdrn.me/

[spencerflem]

Very cool, thanks for the insight