Wondering what companies took the government’s SBA Paycheck Protection Program loan?  How about what government agencies received Federal Weapons that were loaned to them?  How about who received Federal Grants?  Or what colleges received Coronavirus Bailout Money?  You can find all this out at Open The Books.  They have mapping applications that allow you to zoom in on your town/county/state to see the data.  Check it out!

The Huntington Digital Map Collection is an internet catalog of over 8,000 maps of California and the World from The Huntington Library, Art Collection & Botanical Gardens.  The maps range from 16th century European portolan charts to 20th century land use maps, including maps owned by British explorer Sir Richard Burton; the Solano-Reeve collection of surveys of Los Angeles and Southern California tracts; and printed tract maps from the Rare Book Collection.  You can see all of the available maps in the Huntington collection with thumbnails and short descriptions so you can easily choose the ones you want to view more fully.  Check it out!

If you are interested in exploring forestry statistics in your home state, you might enjoy the Forestry Inventory & Analysis Factsheet.  The resource provides “a brief overview of forest resources in each state based on an inventory conducted by the FIA program in cooperation with each State forestry agency.”  Factsheets were created using data from the USDA Forest Service’s Forest Inventory and Analysis database.  To explore the data, toggle over the map and click on a state, or use the dropdown bar in the lower left-hand corner to select a state from the alphabetized list.  Check it out!

Are you a weather fanatic?  If you don’t know about Weather Spark, you should check it out.  It is a wonderful website that offers detailed summaries of typical weather anywhere on Earth.  From the home page, you are invited to enter a location in the search bar or to choose among major cities, and you can also search via an interactive map (linked below the city list) or view a randomly selected place. Each location in Weather Spark’s database has a vast amount of information concisely presented through colorful graphics and text descriptions, including average temperatures, humidity, solar energy, and much more, with reports available for a yearly, monthly, or daily time frame. You can also compare the average weather for multiple locations simultaneously. Check it out!

Interesting article about the resurgence of jigsaw puzzles and how puzzles from centuries ago were mostly made out of maps.  You can even try digital map puzzles online!  Check it out.