Adventures In Mapping

Perhaps as important as fire to the USA Wildfires map, created by Jinnan Zhang and me, is the smoke forecast layer. Fire is a punctuated risk, but the resulting smoke is a far-flung and pervasive risk. The National Weather Service smoke forecast layer is a helpful resource for understanding the current, and projected, concentrations of airborne particulates. Recent improvements … Continue reading Smoke Forecast Timeline added to the USA Wildfires Map

Here is a map of the Great Rift Valley, in Ethiopia. It is very much a 2D map. Sort of. Absolutely. In a sense. It uses the Plan Oblique tool, available in the glorious set of Terrain Tools for ArcGIS Pro, released by Ken Field some time back. Developed by Bernie Jenny and Bojan Šavrič, based on some beautiful hand-wrought oblique … Continue reading How to Make this Map of the Rift Valley

This is the audio from a podcast interview where I got to chat with MiCAMP’s Michael Cousins and Nathan Fazer. We talk about school and work and motivation and creativity and the ups and downs of it all. It was fun chatting with these fellow Michiganders. It’s over an hour long so if I see … Continue reading Podcast Interview with MiCAMP’s Michael Cousins and Nathan Fazer

In geography, an antipode is the exact other side of the world from any given location. When I was a kid, we always used to talk about digging a hole so deep that you’d exit in China. But we foolish Michigan kids didn’t realize that if we really dug a hole straight down, presuming we survived the … Continue reading Turn Your World Inside-Out with Antipodes

This map was made for the lovely folks at Conservation International, to help with an ongoing project regarding stewardship of undersea environments and ecosystems. It is the second in a series, the first being the Salas y Gómez and Nazca undersea ridges. Here’s a how-to video series for that first map, and technique in general. … Continue reading The Emperor Seamounts

Here’s how you can apply a dynamic tinting to vintage black and white hillshade images to create a retro-vibe hand-tinted antique photo sort of aesthetic. Also there is just something lovely about georeferencing the terrain art of cartographers of the past. If you want to skip to the action, jump to 3:10. It’s a “luminosity” … Continue reading Colorize Vintage Black and White Hillshade Maps

This is the map that introduces chapter 4 of GIS for Science Volume 3. It uses modern forest density data from the US Forest Service to give 3D elevation to an 1883 map of the same thing. Trippy. It was a fast and fun collaboration with Chris Oswalt and Hobie Perry of the Forest Service and … Continue reading Make a Vintage Forestry Map 3D With Modern Forestry Data

GIS for Science Volume 3 is a wonderful new book stuffed with examples of the work going on in our spatial science community. Chapter 6, “Conserving the Last Ocean Frontiers” kicks off with a giant map of the Salas y Gómez and Nazca undersea ridges in the eastern Pacific, off the coast of Chile. There are … Continue reading How to Make this Seafloor Map

How do you make the cover for GIS for Science volume 3? You have amazing colleagues like Dawn Wright and Christian Harder who work at the speed of trust! This cover came together remarkably fast, and was a fun and interactive experience with creative collaborators and top-notch content providers. The Half-Earth Project features prominently in this volume so it was a fast … Continue reading How to make the map on the cover of GIS for Science volume 3

—Witten with Sean Breyer— When you are a global Geographic Information Technology company with a globe in your logo, you don’t shy away from the opportunity to have a great big glorious 8.5-foot diameter illuminated rotating globe in your new office building. But what sort of globe cartography do you design? How should this gigantic … Continue reading It’s a Giant Globe!