Looking to buy a home in California? You will need to make $120,120 per year to afford an average home. Check out this article and map of the US showing what your annual salary must be to afford an average home.
Interesting article on mapping and assessing landscape suitability for bee migration. GIS and remote-sensing applications can help to assess and map landscape as well as beekeeping suitability to allow precision beekeeping and hence the promotion of colonies. Check it out!
ESRI has announced the release of the ArcGIS Vector Tile Style Editor, available in beta on the ArcGIS for Developers website. The tool gives you a fast and easy way to create a custom basemap style.
By selecting an existing vector basemap, you can customize the layer colors and labels. You can edit everything from fill and text symbols to fonts, halos, patterns, transparency, and zoom level visibility. When you are finished, the styles are saved as an item in ArcGIS Online with a unique ID. The map viewer or any custom application can then reference the ID to display the basemap. Check it out.
With all that is going on in Hawaii, the USGS is keeping up by mapping the fissure systems and lava flows of the eruption at Kilauea. They also have been taking thermal images so you can really see where the lava is flowing. Check it out!
Wanting to catch a look at some wildflowers in SoCal? You might still have some time. Check out this app by SCAG. Using precipitation, windstorm, natural habitats, and open space data, they mapped likely wildflower blooms and potential superblooms. You can also overlay transit data to plan your trip!
The City Health Dashboard is an online resource with community-level health, social, and economic data for the 500 largest cities in the US. The dashboard reports on 36 key measures of health, such as obesity and opioid overdose deaths, as well as the conditions that influence health, such as housing affordability and reading proficiency. The dashboard represents a first of its kind effort to provide city and neighborhood level data from multiple national sources, creating a one stop online resource to help city leaders and residents pinpoint and take action on gaps in health and opportunity. Check it out!
Interesting article about mapping the ocean floor. I did not know that only 15% of the ocean floor has been mapped so far. An idea to “crowd source” ocean floor mapping is taking hold, using volunteer cargo ships, fishing boats, and pleasure craft to transmit data in real time.
Radio Garden is an interactive globe that allows visitors to listen to over 8,000 live radio stations from around the world. When you visit the site, radio stations are loaded and then you will be directed to the radio station closest to your current location. From there, you can explore other stations around the globe. Cities with multiple participating stations will have a list appear on the right side of the browser, allowing you to choose which station to listen to. By selecting the History tab or the Jingles tab, you can explore historic radio broadcasts and station jingles from across time and space. Check it out!
Check out this 1915 perspective map of Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Mountains, created by the Automobile Club of Southern California.
You can see some town names that do not exist anymore, like Savannah and Lordsburg.
Check out this Library of Congress post about the “father of temperature mapping”, Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), who devised the concept of the isotherm. Cool maps!
SoCalGIS.org 