Category Archives: Tools of the Geographer

These sites are primarily relevant to the tools that geographers use to study the Earth’s systems.

Global Climate Information Visualizing Tool

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NOAA View is a data exploration tool produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and developed by the NOAA Environmental Visualization Laboratory. This interactive map contains over 100 different datasets on a wide range of topics related to the Earth system: ocean, atmosphere, land, cryosphere, climate, and weather models. On the left, click at “Menu” and then “Add Data” to select the dataset to visualize. At the lower left corner, click at “Time” and drag the button to see how data change by time. Users can also click on areas of interest for more detailed information.

I found this an awesome website because of the enormous amount of data available to visualize. For example, under “climate”, we can choose to look to “observations” or “simulations”. I really like the “simulation” tool as we can simulate how ocean/air temperature, precipitation, or sea ice concentration change under low, moderate, high, or very high emissions.

From Garlic Mustard to to Lettuce Aphids to Egyptian Geese – Stay Up to Date!

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EDDMaps collects crowdsourced sightings of plants, insects, diseases, and animals to track distribution and presence across the US. It enables users to report a sighting accompanied by a photo, creates interactive maps of all sightings of a particular species, provides information on each species’ taxonomy and native territory, and provides downloadable datasets including all sightings of a particular species. Users can easily access maps that show all states or counties with reported sightings or look more generally at the entire country, and grouped point symbology makes it easy to identify areas of the country where the species is most common. Additionally, this website offers user support in accessing and using the available data as well as training in reporting species sightings. The images below feature the information available if I am interested in coyotes (Canis latrans).

The crowdsourced nature of this website is incredibly important to the thoroughness of its data collection. Rather than being limited to a specific team of people, data is being collected on a much wider scale by including the sightings of anyone with access to technology. Such maps of species distribution are valuable in tracking the movement of invasive species and the growth or decline of specific populations. By making this data downloadable and available to others, the site promises to expand access to the data and allow for further study.

This interactive distribution map reporting all recorded coyote sightings in the US

A specific record on the map

Counties with reports (left); States classifying species as “invasive” (right)

https://www.eddmaps.org/

 

 

Which Country produces the most pumpkins? Which country consumes the most wine? Which country has the most endangered animals? Look at Worldmapper!

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Worldmapper is a website that shows all kinds of different maps. The maps are not true to size and are distorted to show the percentage of what it is measuring in relation to all of the other countries. There are over a 1000 maps on this website demonstrating different topics from categories, like: connectivity, health, economy, education, environment, habitation, health, identity, people, resources, and society. The maps are of the whole world, but when searching for a particular map, you can also search by region. I think this website is super fun to look at because it has countless maps of a vast range of topics… under the economy and resources tab, there is a map about pumpkin production, yet under the health tab, there are monthly maps about the COVID-19 cases in each region. Each map provides a color key, as well as background about the topic below the map. I’d encourage you to go on this website and click around! Its pretty interesting to see the different maps of topics that you may not have seen maps of before like, countries with the most chickens, countries that have had the most avalanches and landslides in 2000-2017, countries the drink the most wine, and countries with the most Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) production. It is also interesting to see maps of topics we have discussed in class like carbon emissions, and pollution.

www.worldmapper.org

Problems visualizing size on a map because of distortion? Not with this website!

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I came across this handy cartographer’s tool that allows you to take any country on Earth and drag it across a mercator projection map to reveal its “true” size relative to the countries you put it near. As we’ve learned, no flat map perfectly shows the relative sizes or distances perfectly without distortion. However, with the mercator projection, arguably the most widely used map, this distortion can be pretty extreme at the poles, where little to no distortion occurs near the equator. This map is very useful for geographers looking to better visualize the error that map projections create while learning more about the different kinds of projections. On the screenshot below, I’ve shown the true size of Russia compared to the US and Greenland compared to Africa. Russia is still significantly bigger than the US, but Greenland is noticeably smaller than we would normally think it is due to distortion.

https://thetruesize.com/#?borders=1~!MTc5MTcyNjY.MTQ2NTgz*MzYwMDAwMDA(MA

National Geographic: Paul Salopek’s Out of Eden Walk

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Paul Salopek, a slow journalist with National Geographic, is walking the world by foot over the span of a decade, specifically following the paths of our first ancestors who, during the Stone Age, walked out of Africa and into the rest of the world. He seeks the human experience in relation to our Earth. This website is his public journal. Every form of media is bundled up to best represent the human experience. Using ESRI to map his journey and publish dispatches regularly, Paul Salopek essentially connects raw geographic coordinates to stories of individual people and experiences.

https://www.nationalgeographic.org/projects/out-of-eden-walk/

USGS Earth Explorer

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The USGS (United States Geological Survey) Earth Explorer website is a tool that allows you to find satellite imagery data for any given geographic coordinate. To get the data, you can either enter an address, a city, or a set of coordinates into the search criteria search bar, set the date range you would like to receive satellite imagery from, decide what dataset(s) you’d like to get satellite data from (such as Landsat, AVHRR, Sentinel, Radar, etc., these are all different types of satellites that have sensors which give data at different pixel and temporal resolutions. The one you use depends on the type of data you’re looking for.), and then click the “results” button to see the images. This is a tool that would be useful for a geographer because it could be used for various geography fields, such as Remote Sensing and GIS due to its geographic and spatial data.

Below is a picture of one of the houses I grew up in (blue point) located on a zoomed in map of Round Rock, Texas, which I accessed by typing the address into the USGS Earth Explorer search engine!

URL: https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/

Incident Information System

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The Incident Information System (inciweb.nwcg.gov) allows people to find information about wildfires and report new fire incidents. By searching a state, one can find any wildfires in the area and read about the situation’s status, coordinates, fire type and size, and view related news articles and photographs in a full report on the incident. The ability to file reports and have all relevant information in one place is valuable in an effort to prevent wildfires and inform the public on fires in the United States. It can also be useful to scientists conducting research on topics like climate change where abundant country-wide information on wildfires would be beneficial.

https://inciweb.nwcg.gov

Discover Life: A Global ID tool

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Discover Life is a website which aims to map the distribution of species across the globe, as well as help biologists ID species that they find. You can use the search feature to search for plants or animals, finding a map of their distribution, identification pictures, ID guides, scientific name, references, and more for the species. One of my favorite features at the top of the website is the IDnature guides. If you click on IDnature guides, you can check select general traits of what you are trying to ID. Try clicking through the check boxes with a specific animal in mind, and then click “search” next to the trait. On the left side of the screen, an updated list of species with all the traits you’ve searched for are available. click “simplify” (towards the left of the screen, above the potential species) once you have a few traits selected, and the questions will become more specific to sift through the remaining animals. Eventually these questions will key out one species! If you are using this to ID something, it is incredibly helpful because it refines itself to only present relevant questions. A picture of this feature is attached to the bottom of this post.

 

https://www.discoverlife.org/

New Online Tool Highlights Landslide Risk

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USGS has recently released a new online tool that highlights landslide risks across the country. This interactive map provides centralized access to information about landslide occurrence, and can be used as a good starting point for the public, city and emergency planners, as well as researchers interested in landslides, to go to for information. This tool marks the first attempt of a federal agency to systematically catalog all of the landslide data across the country into one centralized location, and will be incredibly useful to all interested parties. Each landslide recorded on the map can be selected, and additional information about the event will be provided, including the date of the event, and notes regarding the extent and aftermath of each event. One clear potential benefit of the tool is to show more at-risk areas of landslides, so individuals can either avoid those areas or prepare restraining walls, or other measures, to minimize landslide damage.

Article link: https://www.usgs.gov/news/landslide-risks-highlighted-new-online-tool

GEOLOUNGE

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GEOLOUNGE is an informational and interesting website. It has information about physical geography, human geography, maps, and more. Under the physical geography tab, they have tabs for biogeography and climatology. After learning about both biogeography and climatology in our class, I was intrigued by the different articles that I found. I wanted to share this article, “These Wolves in Minnesota are Very Very Territorial” that is posted on their site because it relates to our class. The article discusses how researches have used GPA collars to track the movements of 7 wolves at Voyageurs National Park in Minnesota. The data that was collected on the wolves locations is being used to understand pack boundaries and for the Project’s predation research. The screenshots I have included below show the travel paths for each of the wolves. The travel paths show how each pack adheres to territories with little overlap with other packs in the area. I thought GPS tracking of the wolves is an interesting concept and could be used to track more animals and possibly provide insights about animals travel habits which could be used to make better protected conservation areas. 

After reading this article, I clicked on a related link: “Using Remote Sensing for Mapping and Counting Animals.” This took me to GISLOUNGE, which is also another interesting and informational site, related to GOELOUNGE.