Publishing Changes

Updating the Overlay Layers may involve many small changes, and often requires review by multiple contributors. For this reason, changes to these layers are not immediately published to the project homepage. You can think of the administrative view of data layers as a staging area to work on changes before finally deciding to publish. This is helpful to prevent partially configured layers from going out, but you must also remember to publish!

The publish action is represented by a button at the top of the overlays list. It changes color depending on whether or not there are unpublished changes.

The blue button indicates there are changes that have yet to be published

A muted presentation indicates there are no unpublished changes

When ready, click Publish and return to the project view by clicking the Back to Project button to ensure everything looks good from the end-user perspective.

Change Logs

Starting in April of 2026, SeaSketch tracks updates to each project's data layers using a change logging system. Each layer has a history of when it was created, and every edit to titles, access control settings, cartography, metadata, and other details. You can inspect these details from the layer editing sidebar, and you will also see a summary of changes since the last publication of the layer list when you use the Publish action.

Each layer listed in the changes summary should include one or more activity badges that indicate the exact changes made to a layer. For significant changes such as those to cartography or metadata, you can open up a detailed history viewer that will also enable you to rollback undesireable changes.

Note, you will need to refresh your browser after returning to the project view in order to see your changes!