Group items tagged

"Tixik Heatmaps - Lets you add a basic heat map to a simple Google Maps display."

"The power of geographic and spatial information design is often an untapped resource. Much work done by advocacy organisations has some "spatial" element to it and includes data that can, when approached creatively, be easier to explore and understand when mapped or displayed visually. However, until recently, using computer mapping technologies proved to be incredibly challenging, expensive and time consuming and therefore often inappropriate for small and medium-sized organisations."

"Tour Builder is a cool web tool that allows users to create narrative stories using text, graphics, pictures, videos and Google Maps.Tour Builder lets you pick the locations right on the map, add in photos, text, and video, and then share your creation. "

Environmentalists to use new Google 3D Trees mapping tool to preserve forests

"Last week we made imagery from NASA's MODIS available as an overlay for Google Earth, which currently shows the extent of the oil spill through April 29, and we'll continue to add more imagery as it becomes available. We've also made radar images from ESA's ENVISAT available through this KML file. Below, you can see the progression of the spill over time."

Google Chrome recently introduced Land Lines, a delightful new way to explore the gorgeous satellite images from Google Earth. Landlines invites users to discover new satellite images in two ways: Draw and Drag. With the Draw feature, visitors simply create a small doodle on their monitor or personal device. Next, Landlines, with the aid of machine learning, presents visitors with a satellite picture that contains this line or shape in some form: perhaps as a gridded street, the shape of a mountain range, or the curve of a lake. A caption in the bottom left hand side of the browser alerts readers as to what they are looking at and allows visitors to explore each area in more detail via Google Maps. With Drag, users can "create an infinite line of connective rivers, highways, and coastlines." Both modes of exploration offer innovative and highly enjoyable ways to see the world from one's own computer.

If you're looking for some good map-related laughs, give this page a try.

Google's global, zoomable time-lapse map illustrates land use change phenomena such as the sprouting of Dubai's artificial Palm Islands, the retreat of Alaska's Columbia Glacier, deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon, and urban growth in Las Vegas. "Using Google Earth Engine technology, we sifted through 2,068,467 images-a total of 909 terabytes of data-to find the highest-quality pixels (e.g., those without clouds), for every year since 1984 and for every spot on Earth. We then compiled these into enormous planetary images, 1.78 terapixels each, one for each year. As the final step, we worked with the CREATE Lab at Carnegie Mellon University, recipients of a Google Focused Research Award, to convert these annual Earth images into a seamless, browsable HTML5 animation."

journalist Fred Pearce reports on how the rapid spread of community-based, digital mapping is helping indigenous groups worldwide to claim ownership of their lands and protect them from logging and other outside development. From the Congo, to Guyana, to the Australian outback, local communities are increasingly using GPS technology and Google Earth to document their traditional forests, hunting areas, burial grounds, and important cultural sites. As Pearce writes, the aim is to produce maps that governments cannot ignore and that can assist local people in saving their homelands

"The OpenHeatMap site lets you create heat maps and choropleths from uploaded spreadsheet data (CSV format), or Google Docs Spreadsheet data (which makes it continuously updatable). It supports location coding by latitude/longitude coordinates, or by a large number of name/code attributes (e.g. address, FIPS code, zip code, state, province, country). And as a bonus, you can also have time as a variable, letting you create animated heatmaps or choropleths."

"Explore the signs of global warming on this map or Google Earth. The evidence of climate change includes heat waves, sea-level rise, flooding, melting glaciers, earlier spring arrival, coral reef bleaching, and the spread of disease."

We live in the Global Location Age. "Where am I?" is being replaced by, "Where am I in relation to everything else?" The Geospatial Revolution Project is an integrated public service media and outreach initiative about the world of digital mapping and how it is changing the way we think, behave, and interact. Mission The mission of the Geospatial Revolution Project is to expand public knowledge about the history, applications, related privacy and legal issues, and the potential future of location-based technologies. Geospatial information influences nearly everything. Seamless layers of satellites, surveillance, and location-based technologies create a worldwide geographic knowledge base vital to solving myriad social and environmental problems in the interconnected global community. We count on these technologies to: * fight climate change * map populations across continents, countries, and communities * track disease * strengthen bonds between cultures * assist first responders in protecting safety * enable democracy * navigate our personal lives

"Google Earth Engine brings together the world's satellite imagery-trillions of scientific measurements dating back more than 25 years-and makes it available online with tools for scientists, independent researchers, and nations to mine this massive warehouse of data to detect changes, map trends and quantify differences to the earth's surface. "

The CEC's new map layer for Google Earth lets users explore pollution data from over 30,000 industrial facilities in North America. With new information on chemical releases and transfers from Mexican industrial sources now available to the public, the CEC has created the first seamless, North America-wide map layer connecting citizens with point-specific industrial pollutant data in Canada, Mexico and the United States.

"Global, zoomable time-lapse map... View stunning phenomena such as the sprouting of Dubai's artificial Palm Islands, the retreat of Alaska's Columbia Glacier, the deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon and urban growth in Las Vegas from 1984 to 2012 Using Google Earth Engine technology, we sifted through 2,068,467 images-a total of 909 terabytes of data-to find the highest-quality pixels (e.g., those without clouds), for every year since 1984 and for every spot on Earth. We then compiled these into enormous planetary images, 1.78 terapixels each, one for each year. As the final step, we worked with the CREATE Lab at Carnegie Mellon University, recipients of a Google Focused Research Award, to convert these annual Earth images into a seamless, browsable HTML5 animation. Check it out on Google's Timelapse website."

Send a greeting using letter-shaped images from Google Maps

bad maps

From Cartastrophe Blog: "Yesterday evening, I was having a conversation with one of my roommates about Beaver Island, which lay in the north of Lake Michigan. It's a sizable chunk of land with some interesting history. It was, at one point in the 19th century, home to a kingdom inhabited by a breakaway Latter-Day Saints sect, until the US government facilitated the assassination of its eccentric ruler and the ejection of the Mormon settlers. While mentioning the island to my roommate, I pulled up Google Maps in order to show him where it is. Except it wasn't there. An entire archipelago, in fact, was missing from the map."

This map is designed to be used as a base map by marine GIS professionals and as a reference map by anyone interested in ocean data. The base map includes bathymetry, marine water body names, undersea feature names, and derived depth values in meters. Land features include administrative boundaries, cities, inland waters, roads, overlaid on land cover and shaded relief imagery.

You are the BEST, Mike!

Population map of world