Are you ready for beer? Fall means Oktoberfest celebrations around the globe, and ESRI has created the Oktoberfest Score app that ranks your community against others in the US. The app uses demographic, consumer spending, and market potential data and lets you explore beer consumption in your area and discover other communities with similar tastes. Prost!
The 2015 Western States Wildfires map by the American Red Cross consolidates multiple sources of disaster data into a real-time, interactive tool to get information and updates about the wildfires in the western states. Check it out.
Ready for an epic road trip? Visit every place on this 1962 trip planning map. This map has it all. Originally produced by General Drafting Company, it was one of many produced for oil and gas companies that either freely distributed or sold maps at their service stations.
A new NASA satellite image shows that California is sinking even faster than scientists had thought.
Some areas of the central valley are sinking more than 2 inches per month. The rate of sinking is accelerating because the state’s extreme drought is fueling voracious groundwater pumping. Click below for the story.
Check out how Fontana Public Works is using GIS to make sure parks and public landscaped areas are being watered in accordance with drought regulations.
The first world map created by Anaximander. The Catalan atlas commissioned by King Charles V of France. Dr. John Snow’s map of cholera deaths in London. Check out these early data visualizations and see how they developed over time without computers.
Not long ago, obtaining data for a GIS-based project was an arduous task. Because great time and effort was involved with either creating your own data or obtaining data that someone else created, you had to think carefully about the quality of the data that would go into your project. While it can still be cumbersome to obtain data at specific scales for specific areas, cloud-based data services, crowdsourced maps and databases and real-time streaming make it easy for anyone to obtain vast amounts of data in a short amount of time. In an environment where so much data is available, is data quality still of concern? Read more here.
Travel in the slower days of 1906! Here is an interesting map using “isochronic” lines, specifically lines depicting points which may be reached in the same number of hours or days from London in 1906. Need to go to New York? That will be about 8 days of travel. San Francisco? That will be about 15 days. Santiago, Chile? You are looking at over 40 days of travel.
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Looks like ESRI has posted some of the tech session videos from the 2015 ESRI User Conference. Click below to check them out.
What do OpenStreetMap, National Map Corps, Wildebeest Watch, Frack Finder, PlanktonPortal, Galaxy Zoo, Disk Detective, Cyclone Center, SunSpotter, Map Give, and Geo-Wiki have in common? They all use crowdsourced remote sensing for data collection, basically using people’s visual cognition skills which are better than machines to collect data from aerial and satellite images. Check out the article here.
SoCalGIS.org 