The new Historical Topo Map Explorer is out of beta and ready for you to dive into a collection of over 180,000 beautiful vintage USGS topo maps! Use this updated Living Atlas app to geographically browse, download, export, and even animate, these cartographic objects of joy. Here’s how… 0:00 Adventurous introduction 0:23 Navigating the map and finding topos 0:40 Sorting and filtering 0:51 Selecting a topo map 1:07 Downloading or exporting a topo map 1:38 Pinning a collection of topos 2:16 Making and downloading animations 3:22 Draping modern hillshade over vintage topos 3:29 Copyin ..read more

I was watching the Steven Spielberg 1977 classic, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, with the family last night and nerded out when I saw a character that claimed to be a cartographer. I always do. It was the cartographer who recognized that the signals the aliens sent were coordinates. This is how they knew to set up camp at Devil’s Tower in Wyoming. But…do the coordinates really point there? Not really. Speaking of nerding out, allow me to nerd out on coordinates for a minute or so ..read more

Here are a few flavors of a technique, illumination cartography, that uses data to shed light on its underlying basemap. There’s something satisfying about presenting a phenomenon as revealing geography rather than obscuring it. 0:00 Illuminating intro 0:06 Adding some lighthouses from ArcGIS Online 0:16 Firefly point symbology 0:49 Darkening the underlying imagery basemap with Effects 1:11 Illuminating with the Soft Light blend mode … 0:00 Ravishing introduction 0:28 Firing up the viewshed tool in ArcGIS Online 1:24 The viewshed result 1:36 Viewshed as an illumination source 3:24 Creating b ..read more

Of course maps are just the most fascinating and information dense graphical information products around…in my unbiased opinion. I can, and do, go on and on about the deep and pervasive benefits of spatial representations. But…well…sometimes a map, strictly speaking, can have some issues. That’s ok though, because maps are here to fix the problem with maps! Say what? What’s the problem, you might be wondering? Well sometimes the phenomenon that we want to illustrate via a map suffers from the exactitude of the size and shape of the things on the map. For example, there are really big states in ..read more

Here’s how to whip up a three decade animation of deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest, using Landsat Explorer. And it only takes a few minutes. … 0:00 Intro 0:20 Assembling the animation 1:47 Checking the result 2:14 Saving an animation as an MP4 2:44 More animation examples 3:33 Closing … Here are direct links to the animations I show in this video. Just hit play: Amazon deforestation: http://tinyurl.com/3drjz7s4 South Las Vegas: http://tinyurl.com/3yytn5e4 Lake Mead: http://tinyurl.com/cjr7cfbz Bingham Canyon Mine: http://tinyurl.com/na6a6zne Daxing Airport const ..read more

A few moments ago I was asked by a student about the “development of cartography over the next 10 years.” Here’s my somewhat off-the-cuff response, though my thoughts have been steeping in this for the past year or so. In the next 10 years artificial intelligence, and probably artificial general intelligence, will have an unpredictable influence on nearly every aspect of our lives, and this includes the field of cartography. It will, however, still be important to command spatial, visual, and communication concepts such that humans have an understanding of, and insight into (and control/direct ..read more

We’ve all been there. A request comes in and you don’t have a lot of time. Like 5 or 10 minutes. What! Ok, ok, be cool, this is going to be ok. Just breathe…and think. Think. Yes, we’ve got this. We’ve got the tools and the resources to crank out a serviceable map in the amount of time it takes to wait for your name to be shouted out to retrieve your coffee order. … aside … I always use the name “Gunther” for pickup orders. There are invariably like 6 or 7 other Johns waiting for their order; why add to the confusion for the sake of accuracy? Gunther? Now that’s a pickup name that command ..read more

“There’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.” In this 4-part series we’ll walk through the reckoning of a Lord of the Rings style fantasy map, right in ArcGIS Pro. We map-makers get to breathe honest to goodness geographic life into the seminal aesthetic found in the LOTR cartography, and I think that’s a bit of magic just waiting around for us to wield. The map drawn by Christopher Tolkien for his father’s book is a simple and beautiful reference. Absorbed for hours by curious minds through several generations, traced by countless fingers over the decades, and soa ..read more

“The world has changed. I see it in the water.” In this 4-part series we’ll walk through the reckoning of a Lord of the Rings style fantasy map, right in ArcGIS Pro. We map-makers get to breathe honest to goodness geographic life into the seminal aesthetic found in the LOTR cartography, and I think that’s a bit of magic just waiting around for us to wield. The water of Christopher Tolkien is a charming ringed buffer fill technique used by cartographers commonly in the 18th and 19th centuries. In this how-to we will walk through creating a ripple effect to fill the water bodies of Middle Earth ..read more

“I want to see mountains again, Gandalf, mountains. And then find somewhere where I can rest.” In this 4-part series we’ll walk through the reckoning of a Lord of the Rings style fantasy map, right in ArcGIS Pro. We map-makers get to breathe honest to goodness geographic life into the seminal aesthetic found in the LOTR cartography, and I think that’s a bit of magic just waiting around for us to wield. The mountains of Christopher Tolkien are distinct things, more like fences and boundaries than a geological surface. In this how-to we will walk through creating a repeating mountain graphic and ..read more