Using Google Maps to Save the Environment

Clean Up the World

Clean Up the World is a global campaign that inspires communities to clean up, fix up and conserve the environment. Held in partnership with the United Nations Environment Programme, it mobilises an estimated 35 million people across 120 countries.

Clean Up the World Weekend is scheduled for September 19-21. It is a global public service initiative that encourages people to come together to clean up and fix up local parks, beaches and trails. Google is serving as the technology partner this year, providing Google Grants funding as well as consulting services for the My Maps and Google Maps API components of the site.

To take part go to the Clean Up the World website and:

• Register your group/organization and its activity
• Create a My Map of your activity
• Distribute your map to encourage friends, family, and coworkers to help
• Upload descriptions, logos, photos and videos related to your effort
• View your activity on a world map of all planned activities

Ramsar - Områder Map

The Ramsar Convention is an international treaty for the conservation and sustainable utilization of wetlands. This Google Map shows the Ramsar sites for Denmark. The 27 areas range over 7400 km2, and are all nature protected regions.

This map was created by Soren Johannessen using CASA's GMapCreator to convert ESRI shape formats into PNG tiles.

Soren also used the GMapCreator to produce the:

Nitrate Concentration Map
This map shows where there are high concentrations of nitrate in Danish drinking water. This does not mean the water from these areas can not be drunk, but the Danish authorities have to be very carefully in these areas and often have to control the quality of the drinking water.

The data for both mash-ups comes from the The Danish Nature & Environment Portal where lots of Danish enviroment data can be downloaded.

The Guardian/Library House CleanTech 100 Map

The Guardian newspaper in association with Library House have produced the CleanTech 100 list, a list of what they consider the top 100 private companies in Europe involved in clean technology. This Google Map shows where each of the companies is based.

This is a map I developed myself by running the company locations through batchgeocode's geoconverter and then using the Google Spreadsheet map wizard. It took about 20 minutes.

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