Check out this 1947 film about map projections. Film Description: “Development in long-range travel and the growing importance of the Arctic and Antarctic regions make it necessary to understand how maps may be misleading. Experiments with a grapefruit illustrate the difficulty of presenting a true picture of the world on a flat surface and it is concluded that the globe is the most accurate way of representing the earth.” — National Film Board of Canada
As part of the 2020 SCAG Student Showcase, ESRI and SCAG will be leading a free story map webinar training this Friday, March 6th at 10am. This training is available for students interested in competing or learning more about story maps. The competition is open to currently enrolled students at universities/colleges within the SCAG region, as well as those alumni that graduated from college within the last 12 months. For more information about the competition please see the PDF.
To RSVP to the webinar training, please visit the following link: http://scag.wufoo.com/forms/2020-student-showcase-webinar
Other important dates for the Student Showcase include:
o Submission link: http://scag.wufoo.com/forms/2020-student-showcase-submissions
o Submission link: http://scag.wufoo.com/forms/2020-student-showcase-submissions
Examples of Storymaps from past participants:
Once again we are very excited for this opportunity to work with students throughout the SCAG region. Please pass this information along to your students in the best way you see fit. Feel free to reach out to Lyle Janicek at janicek@scag.ca.gov or (213) 236-1966 with any questions you may have.
The United States Water Crisis is an interactive report published as a part of a graduate thesis in May 2019 that explores the effects of forces like “population growth and climate change,” on the United States’s water supplies. The graphic storytelling website allows users to scroll through three sections that demonstrate how our water systems have changed and what the consequences of these changes are. Check it out!
Interesting article about a do-it-yourself cartographer that got so frustrated with the official New York subway map that he designed and sold his own. But the MTA was not too happy about that and came after him. Check it out!
If you have an awareness of data that you did not procure, we are happy to chase down the source if you can provide a pointer to a contact person. We try to duplicate what currently shows in both NOAA’s digital coast and Opentopography.org. If you have updates to an existing entry on the inventory, please let us know by the due dates above.
Any questions, please call either one of us, and feel free to pass this request along to others inside or outside of your organization so that our inventory can be as up-to-date as possible.
Sincerely,
Carol and Drew
Drew Decker
National Map Liaison
U.S. Geological Survey
4165 Spruance Road
San Diego, CA 92101
619-225-6430
619-417-2879 cell
ddecker@usgs.go
The Geospatial Historian is “a tutorial-based open access textbook for historical scholars and digital humanists designed to teach practical digital mapping and GIS skills that are immediately useful to real research needs.” Under Lessons, you will find two series of GIS tutorials geared towards historical analysis and applications. The first series, which uses open-source software, is comprised of four lessons that the project team created for the Programming Historian. The second series contains five lessons that teach mapping, georeferencing, and other applications using ArcGIS. The site also offers a helpful list of resources for Finding Spatial Data, organized by data type and featuring data from around the world. Check it out!
OpenTopography provides high-quality geographic data relating to earth science as well as a platform for researchers to share their own data. Based at the University of California, San Diego, OpenTopography is an ambitious project that “facilitates community access to high-resolution, Earth science-oriented, topography data, and related tools and resources,” and is funded through the National Science Foundation.
You can search or browse the project’s datasets via an interactive data map and a data catalog, both found under Data. Most of these datasets are available in Lidar point cloud format, and many are also available in other formats, such as raster or Google Earth. Check it out!
California has adopted a massive, interactive online database of location-based government data that includes over 1200 publicly available data sets from 25 state entities.
The California State Geoportal collects geospatial data from government agencies including housing, water, transportation and health information. The data is compatible with geolocation software and is designed to be shared, layered onto maps and analyzed.
The portal was designed by ESRI. Check it out!
ESRI has released ArcGIS Earth version 1.10. With this release, users can now:
Check it out and download the free app.
ESRI released ArcGIS Pro 2.5 last week. You can download it from your ESRI account on my.esri.com.
Visit the ESRI blog about what’s new and watch the video below showing the new features in ArcGIS Pro 2.5.
