The Groundwater Quality Map

About half of the U.S. population relies on groundwater for drinking water. The United States Geological Survey is responsible for the National Water Quality Assessment Project, assessing water-quality conditions and whether these conditions are improving or deteriorating over time.

The results of these changing conditions are available in a new USGS interactive map, A Decadal Look at Groundwater Quality. The map shows the concentrations of pesticides, nutrients, metals, and organic contaminants in groundwater and how these have changed over ten years.

Using the map you can select to view the test results for a large number of organic and inorganic constituents. Scaled arrow markers on the map indicate whether the tested aquifers showed an increase or decrease in the selected constituent between the decadal testing. For example, if you select to view the results for chlorine, the arrow markers on the map show that most wells tested have shown an increase in chlorine over the ten years between the two latest tests.

Easy Story Maps

Scroll driven maps can be a great way to tell a story using text, images and your own choice of maps. It is possible to create your own scroll driven story maps using any of the main mapping platforms. Alternatively you can save yourself a lot of work by using a simple Story Map template, like Mapme Stories, CartoDB's Odyssey or Esri Story Maps.

The Mapme map creation tool includes Mapme Stories, a free platform to create amazing stories. Using the Mapme Story editor you can quickly combine text, photos, videos and maps to create your own structured narrative,

A good example of Mapme Stories in action is this Westeros Seven Kingdoms Map. This structured story map takes you on a tour of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. It includes a custom Westeros map, video clips from the TV series and animated gif's.

Esri Story Maps is another simple way to create interesting mapped narratives about any subject. Esri Story Maps provides a number of easy to use templates that allow you to combine map and satellite views with multimedia and other interactive features to create an interactive mapped presentation.

You can get a good sense of the type of story maps you can create with Esri Story Maps on the Esri Story Maps Gallery.

CartoDB's Odyssey story map platform also includes a number of templates that allow you to combine text, multimedia and maps into a simple narrative. Two very popular Odyssey story map templates are the slide template (forward and back buttons allow you to progress through the story) and the scroll template (progress through the story by scrolling).

You can view a live example of the scroll template in this demo map, this demo map also explains how to create your own CartoDB Odyssey story map.

Inside Asia

Inside Asia Tours has created three custom made interactive maps showcasing some of the wonderful destinations that can be visited in Burma, Japan and Vietnam, Cambodia & Laos.

Each of the three custom designed maps feature some wonderful little touches, such as animated boats and sea monsters. The custom map marker icons include little animations and unfurling scrolls which reveal the place labels.when you mouse-over a marker.


If you click on a marker on the map you can then explore the selected tourist destination using Google Maps panoramic Street View. imagery. The only thing really missing from Inside asia is a little background information on the featured locations. It would be nice if the Street View scenes also include a little information about the selected destination.

America in Decline

The best years for many American towns are now way in the past. Their peak years are behind them and all the future seems to offer is more and more population decline.

Using historical census data Lyman Stone has been able to work out in which year every U.S. county recorded its peak population. With an ever increasing national population you would imagine that most U.S. counties are also nearly always seeing an increase in population. However for more than half of counties their peak population is sometime in the past.

In Where Has Population Fallen? Lyman Stone has created a number of interactive d3.js maps visualizing this population data, showing which counties are in decline and which are seeing population increases. He also provides some interesting analysis of these trends (shrinking rural populations and suburbanization being two likely culprits).

The Washington Post has also been working with Lyman's cleaned up census data to create maps of this historical population data. In The places in America that already have their best days behind them the Post has created an animated map which shows the year in which each county reached its peak population. It has also created a static choropleth map of the same data.

The Paris Flood Map

You may have heard that the Louvre museum in Paris has been shut so that staff can save valuable works of art from potential flooding. If you want to know why these works of art are in danger then you should check out the Paris Flood Map.

In Paris the Seine has already burst its banks in several locations and the river is expected to peak today at about 20 feet above its normal levels. The problem for the Louvre is that not only is it next to the Seine but it is also in an area with a high potential risk of flooding.

The Paris Flood Map shows floodplain areas and areas most at risk from flooding. In the screenshot above the Louvre is the area marked in blue (indicating a high flood risk) just north of the Seine. You can use the interactive map to view other high flood risk areas in the Île-de-France. The map also allows you to view which important transport and other facilities are most at risk from flooding in each arrondissement.

Paris's Department of Urban Planning (IAU) has also created a video depicting a 3d mapped simulation of a flooded Paris after the Seine has burst its banks. You can view the video, Simulation 3D d'une inondation centennale à Paris, on YouTube.

Hydropowered Canadians

Hydropower produces about 60% of all the electricity generated in Canada. You can explore Canada's coast to coast hydropower infrastructure on the Canadian Hydropower Interactive Map.

The map shows the location of Canada's hydropower facilities and transmission lines. You can select the markers of the individual hydroelectric installations on the map to view the name of the operator and the installation's capacity.

The text accompanying the map says that Canada has the ability to more than double the amount of electricity generated by hydropower. If you look at the map you can see that northern Québec and northern Manitoba appear to be at least two locations where there is the potential for new hydropower installations. I assume however that the development and infrastructure costs rise significantly the further north you are and the further you are from the more densely populated areas of the country.

Textbook Provision in Kenya

Maria Renee Horn has mapped the number of subject textbooks available to students in public and private schools in Kenya. Textbook Provision in Kenya's Private and Public Schools compares the number of textbooks in five different school subjects in each Kenyan county.

Using the map you can view how many textbooks are available to students in each of five subjects: English, Kiswahili, Math, Science and Social Studies. The proportional markers show the number of books available in each county to both private and public school students. The larger black circle shows the combined numbers for Kenya as a whole.

When looking at the relative differences between the number of books available in private and public schools the subject of Kiswahili seems to be a bit of an outlier. The data for Kiswahili seems to suggest that private schools in Kenya are far less interested in teaching one of the countries two official languages than public schools.

It would be quite interesting if the numbers of textbooks could also be normalized by the number of private and public schools students in each county. This would allow you to view the ratio of books to pupils in each subject in the public and private school systems.

Maps from the Courtside

Interactive mapping platforms have suddenly become very popular tools for visualizing basketball statistics.

In April the Los Angeles Times created a very impressive visualization of every shot made by Kobe Bryant in his long career. Every Shot Kobe Bryant Ever Took uses Leaflet.js to present a shot map of Kobe Bryant's 30,699 career shots, both successful and misses. This was quickly followed by Kudos' Golden State Warriors Map, which uses CartoDB's mapping platform to analyze every game played by the Golden State Warriors in their record breaking 2015-16 season.

Now Gregory Brunner has used Esri maps to create a 3d shot map of Kevin Durant's 2015-16 season. Successful shots are shown (in blue) on top of a plan of the basketball court in Brunner's Courtside Geography. If you flip the map around (use your right mouse button) you can view Durant's missed shots on the underside of the court plan. The map includes a number of buttons which provide hot links to views of the map from the sideline and baseline.

Of course there's no need to stop at mapping individual shots. If you use CartoDB's Torque library you can creating animated maps of whole plays. For example, NBA Movement is an animated map which plots a passage of play during the Clippers vs Rockets game from May 2015.

The map uses data from stats.nba.com. Savvas Tjortjoglou has written up a nice tutorial explaining how you can extract the data from play by play movement animations at stats.nba.com. Jorge Sanz used this tutorial to get the data for the Clippers vs Rockets game in order to create this animated basketball map.

Escaping the Holocaust

The Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust & Genocide, in London, has one of the world's largest archives about the Holocaust and Nazi era. Part of this archive includes documents and testimonies given to the library by refugees from Nazi Germany and other European countries.

The Refugee Family Papers Map allows you to explore and search the Wiener Library's collection of refugee family papers by location. These documents have been donated to the library over the years by Jewish refugees and their families, who escaped Nazi persecution by emigrating from Germany and other Nazi-dominated countries before and during World War II.

Using the map you can learn more about the often harrowing stories of Jewish refugees who managed to escape Nazi persecution. If you select a refugee's marker on the map you can access the documents donated to the library. Many of the refugees have also recorded interviews with the museum. You can listen to these first person accounts of escaping the Holocaust directly from the map.

You can listen to more audio recording made by Jewish survivors of the Holocaust on the British Library's Jewish Survivors of the Holocaust map.

If you want to learn more about the history of the Nazi persecution of Jews in European cities then you might also be interested in:

• Jewish Warsaw - which includes a mapped account of the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw
• Exploring the Vilnius Ghetto: A Digital Monument
• Walk Among Memories - a virtual tour of the Riga Ghetto by the Riga Ghetto and Holocaust in Latvia Museum

The World's Longest Rail Tunnel

Today the world's longest rail tunnel, the Gotthard base tunnel in Switzerland, will see it's first ever train journey. 

The Gotthard tunnel is 57 km long and runs under the Alps between Erstfeld and Bodio. Before the opening of the new tunnel, trains have had to use the Gotthardbahn rail tunnel. Trains using the new tunnel will be able to cut 45 minutes from their journey times.

You can view the new (and the old) tunnel on the wonderful Swiss National Railways map. The two tunnels are shown on the map with a slightly more opaque red line than the overground rail lines. The new tunnel is the one on the right (the far longer one).

The Swiss National Railways Map is an animated map of the Swiss rail network, which shows the real-time position of trains on the network based on the official train timetable. Because train positions are based on the timetable it is possible to simulate the position of trains for future dates.

The link to Swiss National Railways above will take you to a simulation of Swiss Rail for this coming Saturday. This means that you can view the tunnel in action at a time when the line is fully operational. You can change the date and time by altering these parameters in the URL and then refreshing the page.