Grid Generator

About This Tool

The Grid Generator creates a regular spatial grid — square, hexagonal, triangular, or a lattice of points — over a bounding box you define by clicking the map or entering coordinates. Spatial grids are used in environmental monitoring (dividing a study area into sampling units), urban planning (zoning analysis), epidemiology (aggregating case data into uniform cells), systematic field sampling, and any spatial analysis that requires a tessellated reference framework.

Input

A bounding box (two diagonal corner clicks, or manual north/south/east/west bounds), a grid type (square, hexagon, triangle or points), a cell size, and a unit (kilometres, miles, metres, feet or nautical miles). Optionally clip edge cells to the box. Click Generate Grid to build the grid from the current settings.

Output

The grid rendered on the map and downloadable as GeoJSON (FeatureCollection, one feature per cell, each carrying an id property), KML (one <Placemark> per cell), or a CSV of cell-centre coordinates. Square grids additionally tag each cell with row, col and an A1-style label. The summary bar shows cell count, cell size, cell area and total area.

Key Concepts

Square grid

Axis-aligned rectangular cells of equal width and height in the chosen unit, computed geodesically on the WGS84 ellipsoid using Turf.js squareGrid. On a Mercator map, cells appear to narrow at higher latitudes because the projection stretches longitude — but each cell keeps the same angular size, so real-world ground width shrinks slightly toward the poles.

Hexagonal grid (flat-top)

Tessellating regular hexagons with the specified circumradius (centre-to-vertex distance). Each cell has exactly six equidistant neighbours, which reduces the directional bias inherent in square grids — a key advantage for network analysis, disease spread modelling, and any application where isotropy matters. Generated using Turf.js hexGrid.

Triangle grid

Tessellating triangles produced by splitting a square grid along its diagonals, via Turf.js triangleGrid. Useful where a finer or alternating tessellation is required.

Point grid

A regularly spaced lattice of points marking cell centres, via Turf.js pointGrid. Commonly used to generate systematic sampling locations rather than filled cells.

Bounding box

The minimum axis-aligned rectangle enclosing the two corners, expressed internally as [min_lng, min_lat, max_lng, max_lat]. By default cells are fitted within the bounding box, so a small margin may remain along the edges; only the triangular grid can extend slightly beyond the boundary, and Clip cells to box trims those.