The 2018 Maps of the Year

It is always hard selecting a few maps from the thousands of visualizations featured on Maps Mania over the course of one year. Therefore this year I thought I would cheat a little in how I choose my favorite maps of the year. Instead of trawling through 365 days of Maps Mania posts this year I have selected my favorite maps from the Maps of the Year lists already compiled by other people.

National Geographic's Billions of Birds Migrate. Where Do They Go? is a fantastic story map which explores and visualizes the migratory flight routes of different species of American birds. The story map includes animated weather layers, an animated seasonal vegetation layer and animated distribution maps for a number of different bird species. It also features a simply stunning map graphic (pictured above) which shows the migratory flight paths of many different types of American birds.

The Billions of Birds Migrate story map features in National Geographic's own Most Memorable Maps & Graphics of 2018. This round-up features 10 maps and graphics chosen by the magazine's cartographers from all the maps and graphics created for the magazine in 2018.


Kenneth Field is a hard man to please cartographically. Therefore you can be assured that Cartonerd's Favourite Maps from 2018 is a selection of only the very best maps from the past 12 months.

Kenneth's collection includes Zeit Online's Streetscapes. In a series of articles Zeit analysed 450,000 German street names to explore how place-names can provide a fascinating insight into the cultural and social attitudes of the German people. If there was one map to push National Geographic's Billions of Birds Migrate close for map of the year it would be Zeit Online's Streetscapes.


The New York Times has also compiled a long list of 2018 articles which featured graphics and visualizations. 2018 The Year in Visual Stories and Graphics includes a number of maps which were created by the NYT to illustrate some of the year's biggest news stories.

This collection of maps includes one published to visualize the U.S. House Election Results 2018. The NYT's map of November's U.S. elections was rightly praised at the time for its imaginative use of both a map and cartogram visualization of the election results. The inclusion of a cartogram view of the results provided an accurate representation of the size of the votes won by the Democrats and the Republicans. While the map view allowed readers to accurately see where each party held sway.

FlowingData has also compiled a list of its favorite data visualizations of the past year. The Best Data Visualization Projects 2018 includes a couple of mapped data visualizations but isn't confined  to only geographical representations of data.