- Author: Andy Lyons
Calling all water resource managers and researchers! Do you have spatial data of water stocks, water infrastructure, or water usage? Do you have a story to go with it? Then you have everything you need to submit a map idea for an exciting open-source atlas project.
Guerrilla Cartography, the non-profit cartography group that put together the stunning Food: An Atlas, recently announced another call-for-maps for their second big project: Water: An Atlas. If you haven't heard of this group, Guerrilla Cartography is an Oakland-based consortium of cartographers that believe heavily in the power of maps to tell stories, the art and science of cartography, and the power of collaboration between cartographers and researchers. For each atlas project, they pair volunteer cartographers with researchers to turn basic maps into beautiful works of art, then crowd-fund to print the atlases which are also available for free as PDFs. See for example how they portrayed California's almond production in the 2013 Food Atlas.
The water theme is certainly topical, as drought, ground water depletion, and sea level rise are major issues throughout the western US and around the world. Most of us notice water issues when there is either too much or too little water right in front of us. Maps are uniquely suited to convey the spatial and temporal scales of water, and the atlases produced by Guerrilla Cartography are as artistic as they are informative. I can't wait to see the stories revealed through maps when the atlas comes out next spring. The deadline to submit an idea for a map is September 12, 2016, so hop on it water researchers!
- Author: Shane Feirer
Day 3 of the ESRI User Conference, new tools, new story maps, and new ways to work with data.
New Tools, ESRI is supporting new tools with the python and R programming languages. With python they have integrated the ability to easily use 3rd party libraries within ArcGIS by integrating conda into the upcoming release of ArcGIS Pro 1.3 and they have also made it possible to use python to manage ArcGIS online content with the Python API. With R, ESRi has released a ArcGIS R Bridge that allows for the use use or esri data sets in R and the easy use or results from your R analyzes in ArcGIS.
New Story Maps, at the user conference last year, ESRI highlighted a new story map style called the cascade story map. I found out yesterday that they have developed an app builder for this new style of story map and they have also released another style called a crowdsource story map. I also reached out to the developers of story maps today and found out they are developing a new template, they are going to share this new template with us. I cannot wait to see how these storymaps will be used by UCANR in the coming months / year.
New ways to work with data, ESRI has developed new ways to work with data, these data may include Big Data or Multi-dimensional Data. In the case of Multi-dimensional Data they have highlighted new tools to work with netcdf data, but they also showed how that are using existing tools within ArcGIS to work with Multi-dimensional Data. These tools start by importing Multi-dimensional Data into raster mosaics and they using the full suite of ArcGIS tools on these data structures. When it comes to Big Data, they have created a new suite or tools and capabilities within ArcGIS that will allow us to perform big data analysis directly within ArcGIS. Multi-dimensional Data can be used now with ArcGIS and Big Data Analytics will be available in the coming months.
I look forward to seeing what the 4th day will bring.