Sunday, April 19, 2015

The Greatest Maps of the Week


The standout map this week was clearly the Interactive Map of A Year In The Life Of Earth's CO2. The map is a great animated visualization of one year's carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide concentrations around the world. It is also an amazing technical achievement.

The Cartography and Geovisualization Group at Oregon State University has created the map from NASA's video, A Year In The Life Of Earth’s CO2. That's right this interactive globe is actually a video.

Oregon University have somehow managed to turn an HTML5 narrated video into an interactive globe. This mean that you can zoom in and out and pan the video just as you could any interactive globe. The map also includes a timeline control which allows you to jump to view any month within the video.


While Oregon University have been busy turning a video into a map Google has been working away at turning a video into an interactive Street View image.

Inside Abbey Road allows you to explore around the famous Abbey Road music studios using Google's panoramic imagery. During your virtual stroll around Abbey Road you will encounter a number of little interactive features which allow you to watch videos of musicians recording at Abbey Road and which even let you take control of the mixing decks in the studio control rooms.

Walk into the Mastering room and you get to experience a video Street View, a panoramic video featuring a sound engineer in action.


This German sitemap is also a very clever map, although at first glance you might not realize that it is actually a map. Medizintechnologie.de has created a Leaflet.js powered map from a hierarchical organisational chart of their website. The result is an interactive sitemap of the Medizintechnologie.de website.

Zoom in on the map and text site links are added to the markers lower in the hierarchical chain. You can also mouse-over each marker to see where the link leads to on the Medizintechnologie.de website. When you click on a marker link the website content for that page is dynamically loaded beneath the map.


There are half a million trees in the naked city. This map has all of them.

NYC Street Trees by Species is an interactive map of all New York's trees. The most populous trees in the Big Apple are London Planetrees, closely followed by the Norway Maple. The map allows you to visualize the distribution of each species of tree separately or view all species at once. The dot size of each tree on the map is roughly proportional to its trunk diameter.

The data for the map comes from the last Street Tree Census, carried out in 2005. There is another census this year and the map will be updated when the new data is released.


On Broadway is a continuous side view of Broadway created from placing Google Maps Street View images of the street side-by-side. The interactive includes Google Street View images of the facades of buildings along Broadway, a color palette of the facade colors, social media and taxi statistics, Instagram photographs and a color palette of the Instagram photographs.

Each layer in the interactive is a separate canvas layer. You can zoom in and out of each image in the interactive. You can also navigate to neighborhoods along Broadway by using the neighborhoods links running along the bottom of the interactive.

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