Peaky Finders

I first wrote this post 9 years ago. I've decided to bump Peaky Finders to the front page of Maps Mania again in celebration of the fact that these three interactive maps still work. 90% of the interactive maps that I wrote about on this blog a decade ago no longer work. Not only are these three interactive mapping applications still flourishing all three are also really fantastic uses of location data.

PeakFinder is a really useful application which can generate a 360° panoramic map which names all the visible peaks and hills which you can see around you from your current location.

To create a panorama users just need to share their location with PeakFinder. PeakFinder will then magically create a a 360° panoramic sketch of the view from your location. You can then zoom in & out and pan around the panorama and identify the names of all the peaks which surround you.



HeyWhatsThat also allows you to create panoramic sketches showing names of visible peaks. HeyWhatsThat allows the user to click on highlighted peaks to view the name and see the peak's location on a Google Map. This map view also displays the distance and the direction to the selected peak from your location.



Generate a Panorama lets you click on a Google Map and create a bird's eye representation of the view from that location. To generate your own view you just need to click on a location on the map. You can then drag a polyline to choose the direction you wish to view and you can also adjust the span of the view. Like PeakFinder and HeyWhatsThat this application also labels all the peaks that you can see from your current location.

It's Open Mic Nite

There are lots of webcam maps which allow you to view live webcam feeds from locations around the world (check-out Earthcam, igoCam and Ivideon TV). Most of the well known sound maps however are not live, and tend to feature prerecorded sound clips rather than allow you to listen to live audio feeds. 

That is why I have taken a shine to the Locus Sonus Stream Project, which is an interactive map featuring open microphones around the world that provide permanently streaming local sounds. Click on any of the mike shaped markers on this map and you can listen live to the real-time sounds being recorded at that location. The map also features a day-night overlay so you can tell at a glance which of the open microphones are currently capturing daytime sounds and which are recording at night.

Locus Sonus is actually a research group which is interested in the relationship between place and sound.If you click on the 'about' link on the Locus Sonus Stream Project map you can view instructions on how to set up your own live streaming microphone, using a Raspberry Pi, a phone, tablet or computer. If you are struggling to identify the sounds from one of the open microphones you can always click on the 'read more' link to view some clues as to what sounds can normally be heard on the live audio stream.

The UK's Most Dangerous Roads

Every year Ageas Insurance and the Road Safety Foundation release an interactive map which rates the UK's main roads based on the number of serious accidents occurring in the past few years. The Dangerous Roads 2021 interactive map uses data from the Department of Transport to rate individual road sections based on the number of serious crashes which happened on them from 2017-2019.

On the map road sections are colored to show their 'road risk level'. This rating is based on the number of "crashes resulting in death and serious injury" weighted by the amount of road traffic each section carried. The map also uses colored markers to highlight road sections which have shown significant safety improvements or deterioration (when compared to the period 2014-16). 

The section of road with the most improved safety record in the UK is on the A688 between Barnard Castle and West Auckland. This section of the A688 has seen an 85% reduction in serious crashes. Perhaps it is a result of people driving carefully to Barnard Castle while testing their eyesight.

You can also explore the UK's most dangerous roads on the Most Dangerous Roads in Britain map. This interactive map of dangerous roads shows the UK roads with the highest accident rate (although this map is using older crash data from 2007-2016).

According to this map the top 13 most dangerous roads in the UK are all in London.Using the Most Dangerous Roads in Britain map you can view the top 50 most dangerous roads (ranked in order in the map side-panel) or you can view the most dangerous road in each UK region. The map shows the UK roads with the highest accident rate. These are the roads with the highest ratio of accidents to the amount of traffic.The data for the map comes from the Department for Transport and covers ten years of road use from 2007-2016.

A Nation Still Under Fire

ABC News has created an animated interactive map which shows the location of every shooting incident in the USA last week. Press play on the One Nation Under Fire map and you can watch as all corners of the United States are peppered by over 900 shooting incidents.

Reminder: this map shows just one week of shooting incidents in America (July 17-23 2021).

Last year there were 43,000 gun deaths in the United States. This year is shaping to be just as deadly. Last week there were over 1,000 shootings. 404 people died in those shootings and 928 were wounded.

According to Wikipedia's List of countries by firearm-related death rate the United States has a firearm-related death rate of 12.21 per 100,000 people per year. That is about 61 times as high as the United Kingdom's rate of 0.20, or over 600 times as high as Japan's rate of 0.02.

The ABC News map uses data from the Gun Violence Archive, who collect data on gun-related violence in the United States.The Gun Violence Archive has a map showing the location of all gun deaths in the USA this year. So far there have been over 25,000 deaths. 177 of those deaths were children under 12 years of age and 715 children aged 12-17.

The Newspaper Archive Map

Ancestry's Newspaper.com claims to be the largest online archive of newspapers. The archive includes searchable articles from over 21,000 newspapers dating back to the 1700's (although there seems to be a distinct bias towards English language newspapers). 

Using Newspaper.com's interactive map you can search for historical newspapers by location and by date. If you pay to subscribe to Ancestry you can then read the digitized articles. A similar service exists in the UK at the British Newspaper Archive, which allows you to search archived British newspapers for free but only allows registered users to read actual digitized content from the archived papers. 

The NewspaperArchive provides a similar subscription service to Newspaper.com, allowing you to search 'billions' of newspapers from around the world.Again you can search the archived newspapers for free but you need to register to actually view and read the archived articles. 

You can search and read through 129 years of New York Times back editions on the newspaper's TimesMachine website (again a subscription is needed). Using the TimesMachine's interactive interface you can read the Time's contemporary accounts of historical events, including the shooting of President Lincoln, the sinking of the Titanic and the landing of the first men on the moon.

By using the zooming and panning controls used by interactive mapping platforms, the New York Times provides users with familiar navigation controls with which to browse through its historical archives. The TimesMachine relies on panning, zooming and the click & drag method that web users are familiar with from using mapping platforms, such as Google Maps.

Wikipedia also maintains a list of online newspaper archives. This list includes links to both free and paid archives of newspapers around the world. The Wikipedia introduction to its list also includes the handy advice that some local library services may have subscriptions to newspaper archives which you may be able to access for free if you have a library card.

One other option is to explore the archives of still operating newspapers. The Newspaper Map provides direct links to thousands of newspapers currently operating all around the world.

The World is Burning

In the summer the Northern Hemisphere normally experiences a number of large wildfires. However this year, following record breaking temperatures across large areas of the Northern Hemisphere, the number and size of wildfires has been unprecedented.

Wildfires have burned over 1.5 million hectares in Siberia. In Northern California the Dixie Fire has burned an area the size of Chicago. In Canada British Columbia has declared a state of emergency with nearly 300 active wildfires. In Italy around 7,500 firefighters have been fighting wildfires in Sardinia. In Northeastern Spain a large area near Tarragona has been blazing since Saturday. In France over 900 hectares of forest has burned in the department of Aude.

NASA's FIRMS (Fire Information for Resource Management System) interactive map provides near real-time active fire locations using data gathered from MODIS and VIIRS satellites. The FIRMS map is updated every five minutes. The satellites from which the data is gathered generally make two complete global overpasses a day. The data from these satellites is usually processed within three hours. You can actually overlay the satellite overpass tracks on top of the FIRMS map to see the acquisition times for a specific location.

 

The Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS) interactive map provides a 10 day danger forecast and near real-time information on active fires around the world.This map also uses FIRMS data. By identifying areas with higher temperatures than surrounding areas FIRMS is able to identify locations with active fires. The GWIS map also allows you to view burnt area perimeters for active fires using the same satellite data.

Kontur's Global Fires interactive map allows you to visualize all of the past year's global fire data. It also can be used to visualize smoke pollution during wildfire seasons around the world. The Global Fires map consists of two main views. Using the 'Fire (last year)' option you can view a year's worth of global wildfire activity play-out on the map. The other main view of Global Fires is the 'Air Quality (now)' option. This allows you to view the current data from air quality monitors across the world.

The British Conversation Map

If you have ever traveled around the UK then you've probably discovered that the natives aren't always friendly.Talking to strangers is one of those 'foreign' activities which is largely frowned upon by your average Brit. Which is why whenever I travel around Britain I take along Cecil W. Bacon's What Do They Talk About? map

What Do They Talk About? is a humorous pictorial map of the UK which was published by the Geographical Magazine in 1951 during the Festival of Britain. The map depicts local buildings, landmarks and industries and text labels which highlight popular local topics of conversation. 

Some of the conversation topics suggested by the map are ones you would probably guess yourself. For example it is fairly obvious that in Cambridge people usually chat about Isaac Newton and the Universe, while in Oxford the conversation often involves philosophical discussions about Aristotle's ideas on deductive logic. 

Unfortunately some of the conversation topics are now a bit out-of-date. Conversation about 'the pit' in South Wales and 'the mill' in the North East died out with the collapse of UK industry. However it is good to see that many other British traditional topics of conversation still persist. For example to this day it is impossible to visit Bath without a conversation about the 'Regency Days' or discussing the 'Test Team' in Yorkshire.

The map cartouche proclaims that "Most people talk about the place where they work-the pit, the office, the mill ..." This preoccupation with occupations and local industry features heavily on the map. Therefore in Northampton they talk about 'Boots and Shoes', in Sheffield they chat about 'Steel', in Coventry they discuss the 'Internal Combustion Engine' and in the Potteries all the talk centers around (you guessed it) 'Pots'. 

It is interesting that despite the dramatic contraction of industry in Britain since the 1950's that many UK cities are still strongly associated with certain particular industries and occupations, even if most of the locals no longer work in these industries. However despite the strong bonds of history and tradition the 'What Do They Talk About? map does now feels like a product of its time. Which makes me feel that the world might be ready for a new 'What Do They Talk About? map ... (to be continued) ...

The Cuckoo Flying the Nest

Because the European common cuckoo is an obligate brood parasite and lays its eggs in the nests of other birds it is free to migrate south much earlier than other species of birds. In early summer, when most other bird species are busy raising their young (and sometimes the young of cuckoos), the adult cuckoo is able to begin its migration to Africa. Adult cuckoos in Europe are among the first bird species to begin their migrations. For example in the UK most cuckoos begin flying south in June.Which is great news for anyone who is interested in tracking the progress of migrating Cuckoos.

The British Trust for Ornithology's Cuckoo Tracking Project is currently mapping the migration of twelve European common cuckoos on their journey from the UK to their wintering grounds in the Congo basin of central Africa.The map shows the latest recorded location of each bird and the route they have taken from the UK. The map also includes a playback feature which allows you to watch each bird's entire journey from the 2nd May animated on the map. 

Over the last couple of weeks eyebrows have been raised over the movements of one of the tracked cuckoos. Around the middle of July the cuckoo name Attenborough (in honor of the famous natural historian and broadcaster) decided to suddenly take a massive detour in an easterly direction. He left Spain and flew via Sicily to Greece. This is quite a detour on his journey to his hopeful destination in the Congo basin. 

A cuckoo flying from the UK to central Africa will typically fly travel around 5,000 miles. This is an epic journey but not as far as the migrations taken by the cuckoos who migrate from Mongolia to eastern Africa every year. Mongolian cuckoos make migratory journeys of around 7,500 miles to and from Africa. 

In 2019 the Mongolia Cuckoo Project tracked five cuckoos migrating from Mongolia to Africa. These five birds included a cuckoo called Onon, who made a 16,155 mile migratory round trip to Africa and back to Mongolia. This was one of the longest recorded journeys made by any land bird. 

On Onon's epic journey he visited China, India, and Saudi Arabia. Unfortunately he was the only one of the five tracked birds in the Mongolia Cuckoo Project who successfully made the full round trip. Onon himself is suspected to have died the following year. His tag stopped transmitting in southern Yemen in September 2020.

The World's Biggest Cities

Urban Agglomerations Worldwide is an interactive map which shows the population size of the world's largest cities. The map uses data from the United Nations to show the size of all the urban agglomerations around the world with a population over 300,000. 

On the map the size and color of the markers show the population size of the city. You can also hover over the circles on the map to discover the actual city population. According to the United Nations data (from 2018) the largest 'urban agglomeration' in the world is Tokyo, with a population of over 37 million.The next largest city is Delhi, with a population over 30 million, closely followed by Shanghai with a population of over 27 million.

For the purposes of the United Nations data set an 'urban agglomeration' is defined as a 'contiguous urban area or built-up area that delimits the city’s boundaries'. Obviously the size of a city's population is partly defined by where you draw its boundaries. For example the top 5 megacities with the largest populations according to Wikipedia are:

1. Tokyo (38,140,000)
2. Shanghai (34,000,000)
3. Jakarta (31,500,000)
4. Delhi (27,200,000)
5. Seoul (25,600,000)

Jakarta (3rd on Wikipedia) is ranked on this map as only the 31st largest city by population. Seoul (5th on Wikipedia) is 35th.

Maps (or lists) which rank cites by population therefore often turn into discussions about how you define the boundaries of the ranked cities.Which is why I think it usually makes more sense to map the density of the world's population by area.

You can view a very granular visualization of global population density on The Pudding's Human Terrain map. This interactive visualization shows population density across the globe using 3D population pyramids. 

The taller a pyramid block on The Pudding map then the more people live there.The Pudding has also used its own map to explore in more detail the pattern of population density around the world. In Population Mountains The Pudding examines how unevenly the world is populated and how and why population density can take different forms in different parts of the world.

Data: 

• The Urban Agglomerations Map uses United Nations data - (File 12  under the Urban Agglomerations tab)
• The European Commission's Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL) also provides spatial information on the physical size of human settlements and on the population sizes of those settlements.

Driving Times from Paris

Time Distance to Paris by Road 2021 in an interactive isochrone map which shows how long it takes to travel by car from Paris to any other location in France. 

An isochrone map uses lines on a map to connect points which can be reached in the same travel time. On Nicholas Lambert's Time Distance to Paris by Road 2021 different colors are also used to visualize areas which can be reached in the same time steps.Because this is an interactive isochrone map you can also select a time period on the map key to view all the areas in France which can be driven to in that time highlighted on the map. For example if you select 60 minutes on the map key then you can see all the areas that you could to travel to in an hour highlighted in blue.

Because Time Distance to Paris by Road 2021 is an Observable notebook it can be forked to work with other locations. For example, Laurent Jégou has forked the map to create his own isochrone map visualizing the Time Distance to Toulouse 2021. Tristram Gräbener has also forked Nicholas Lambert's original map to create a Time Distance to Paris by Train isochrone map.

You can view other examples of interactive travel time maps using the Maps Mania iscohrone tag.

Canada's Interactive Energy Map

About 67% of Canada’s electricity comes from renewable sources. The vast majority of that (61%) comes form hydroelectricity. Canada is the third largest hydroelectricity provider in the world.The next largest source of electricity in the country is nuclear, which contributes around 15% of Canada's electricity production. 

You can learn more about the different types of electricity source in Canada, including where they are generated and how they are transmitted around the country on Canadian Geographic Education's Interactive Energy Map. The map plots the locations of Canada's significant energy production sites, the major fuel pipe & electricity transmission lines, and Canada's energy processing facilities. The interactive map includes filter controls which allow you to explore each energy sector individually, which allows you to see where the different energy sources in Canada are located in the country.

The Interactive Energy Map paints a rather rosy picture about Canada's contribution to fossil fuel consumption. Although 67% of Canada's own electricity use comes from renewable sources the map doesn't reflect that Canada is also a huge exporter of oil and gas. The Government of Canada for example says that hydroelectricity actually only contributes around 4.5% of Canada's primary energy production. Oil and gas on the other hand make up 57% of the country's primary energy production.

 

You can explore how America generates power on the U.S. Power Plants map. U.S. Power Plants is an interactive map showing the locations, size and type of America's electric power plants. The map is a great way to see where different types of power plant are located, how much each type of energy source contributes to the country's power supply and how much each source contributes to CO2 emissions.

The number of map filters on U.S. Power Plants means that the map can provide lots of different insights into American power supply. For example the individual fuel filters allow you to see where different power sources are concentrated in America. Select hydro-power and you can see that hydro-power plants are concentrated in the north-west and north-east of the country. While solar power plants are mainly located in California.

 

Esri's Atlas of Electricity is another great way to explore where the USA gets its electricity from and how it distributes this power across the country. At the heart of an Atlas of Electricity is an interactive map plotting the location and size of the grid's power plants and transmission cables. This map allows you to explore the location and capacity of the country's electricity producing power plants and how they connect to the national grid.

As well as mapping the physical infrastructure of the electricity grid this story map examines the primary energy sources used to generate electricity in the USA. It maps the size and capacity of coal-fired power plants, natural gas power plants and petroleum power plants. Alongside these fossil-fuel sources of power An Atlas of Electricity plots the size and capacity of the U.S.'s nuclear power plants, hydroelectric power plants and solar & wind power plants.

The Smoke Forecast Map

The devastating wildfires burning in Canada and the USA are contributing to poor air quality conditions, sparking air quality advisories in large areas of both countries.  The Smoke Forecast map allows you to view a forecast of where in Canada smoke pollution is likely to occur over the next two days.

On the interactive Smoke Forecast map the areas colored brown are forecast to experience high levels of smoke. The darker the color on the map then the higher the ground level concentration of particulate matter is expected to be. The map includes an animation control which allows you to view the smoke forecast for the next 48 hours animated on the map or to select a specific hour to view its smoke forecast.

You can also view the extent of the smoke across north America on NOAA's Smoke Forecast map. NOAA's High-Resolution Rapid Refresh Smoke Interactive map identifies locations with intense fires and forecasts how smoke is likely to disperse based on the latest weather forecasts. The smoke forecast map is experimental. It is prone to errors from cloud cover preventing satellite detection of wildfires and to errors in weather forecasts.

360 Degree Panoramic Maps

The Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library has created some interesting interactive maps from panoramic images in their collection. In Maps that will make your head spin you can view three different historical panoramic sketches as 360 degree panoramic images. 

The panoramic images in this little virtual reality collection include an 1860 360 degree drawing of the Battle of Gettysburg, an 1850's engraving of Boston as seen from Bunker Hill, and the view from Mount Washington as drawn in the early 20th Century.

This isn't the first time I've seen an interesting presentation of the panoramic view from Mount Washington. John Nelson and Jinnan Zhang created an interesting Rotating Bird's Eye View From Mount Washington. In John and Jinnan's interactive version of the Boston and Maine Railroad's map you can rotate the map using your mouse's scroll-wheel. As you scroll on the page the map rotates around its center.

The Birds-eye view from summit of Mt. Washington; White Mountains, New Hampshire was created in 1902 by the Boston and Maine Railroad company. The map shows the view from Mount Washington in New Hampshire. The map numbers all the mountains surrounding Mount Washington and identifies each of them in corresponding lists in each of the map's four corners. What is most interesting about the map is its 360-degree panoramic perspective. The mountain summit and the railroad station are positioned at the center of the map. The surrounding topography is then distorted and wrapped around this central view. 

If you held the map in your hands at the top of Mount Washington and rotated the map to reflect your direction of view you could easily identify each of the mountains in your current vista.

100 Years of Plane Crashes

The first fatality in a powered aircraft occurred over a century ago in 1908. The pilot was Orville Wright, the co-inventor of the first ever motorized aircraft. The crash of the plane piloted by Wright resulted in the death of his passenger, Signal Corps Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge.

The ASN Aviation Safety Database records around 22 thousand airplane crashes since August 2nd, 1919. In One Century of Plane Crashes Buğra Fırat explores and visualizes the 22 thousand plane crashes which have occurred over the last 100 years.

Buğra's visualizations of the data includes an interactive heat map which shows where these crashes have occurred around the world. When exploring this map it is important to consider that locations with a lot of air traffic (for example major airports) are statistically more likely to have witnessed the most crashes. To me some of Buğra's other visualizations of the plane crash data are more interesting. For example his timeline of all the crashes from 1919 to 2019 shows how World War II and the Vietnam War were both periods with a higher than normal number of crashes. 

Those of you who obsess over aircraft safety might also be interested in Buğra's visualizations of the number of crashes by plane manufacturer and by the age of the aircraft. However, if you are scared of flying, then you might want to give One Century of Plane Crashes a complete miss.

The Magic Mushroom Map

The Liberty Cap mushroom (Psilocybe semilanceata) usually appears around late summer and early Autumn. I've already seen a few sprouting up on my walks around East London (probably because we have had a wet summer). Which may be why over the last couple of days I've seen a lot of people linking to the Magic Mushroom Map on social media.

The Magic Mushroom Map shows when and where magic mushrooms are likely to be in season. The map was created by matching the dates and locations of historical Liberty Cap growth records with information on habitat and weather. Using this data it is then possible to model when and where Liberty Cap mushrooms are likely to be in season.

The areas shaded red on the interactive Magic Mushroom Map are where the Liberty Cap is likely to be currently in season. If you buy a 'season pass' you can use the map timeline to discover when magic mushrooms are most likely to be in season at your location.

Warning: Magic Mushrooms are listed as a Class A or Schedule 1 drug in many countries.

If you are interested in foraging for non-psychedelic edibles then you can use the Falling Fruit or Mundraub interactive maps, which show you where you can find fruit trees and other edible plants in your local area.  

Street Names & Naming Cultures

Back in 2013 Noah Veltman released his inspired interactive map, the History of San Francisco Place Names.Noah's map provides a fascinating insight into the history of San Francisco street names (click on any of the streets on this map and you can discover how it got its name and who or what it was named for). 

The History of San Francisco Place Names includes an option which allows you to filter the map to view street names in various categories. For example, if you select 'military' you can view all the streets in the city named after soldiers or battles highlighted on the map. 

Noah's map inspired me to create my own Streets of London interactive map, which takes a look at the etymological history of road names in the City of London. This map was also partly inspired by my favorite quiz question 'How many roads are there in London?'. The answer being that there are no roads in the City of London.

There are however a lot of streets, alleys and lanes. The reason that there are no roads in the City of London is that most of the city's streets pre-date our modern use of the word 'road'. The meaning of the word 'road' to indicate a byway did not emerge until the late 16th Century - a long time after most of the roads in the City of London were established and were already named. 

Thanks to Noah I now have a fascinating interest in toponyms. In how places and streets are named, where those names come from and what those names mean. In recent years this interest has been piqued most often by the work of geochicas (and others) to explore how the naming of streets in cities around the world nearly always favors men over women.

The creators of Streetonomics obviously share my interest in toponyms. Streetonomics is a new interactive mapping website which "studies human behavior and cultural trends through the quantitative analysis of street names". 

In simpler terms Streetonomics has created a series of interactive map which allow you to explore and discover more about the people who have streets named after them in New York, Paris, Vienna and London. On these four interactive city maps all the streets which have been named for individuals are shown using different colors. You can click on any of streets on the map to view who the street was named for and learn more about who that person was.

The Streetonomics individual maps for each city include a number of filters which allow you to explore which streets in the city have been named for men and which have been named for women. You can also explore which streets have been named for people from different periods in history, frrm different occupations, and from their country of origin.

If I have piqued your interest in the names of streets and places then you might want to explore the maps posted under the toponym tag on Maps Mania.

The Future Risk of Flooding

The recent devastating floods in central Europe, in parts of America and in New Zealand have obviously led many people to wonder about how susceptible their homes are to flooding. One consequence of global heating and rising sea levels are that flood risks are increasing across the world and the kind of lethal floods seen in Belgium and Germany over the last week are going to become much more common.

Climate Risk's Coastal Risk Map allows you to view your risk from projected sea level rise and coastal flooding by year, water level, and by elevation.Share your location with the Coastal Risk Map and you can view the potential flood risk for different years and for different levels of sea level rise. Climate Central's Risk Zone Map provides additional data for the United States and most Caribbean nations on which populations, infrastructure, and land are most in danger from sea level rise and coastal flooding.

If you don't live by the coast then you can explore your flood risks on the Flood Factor interactive map. Last year the First Street Foundation published their study into flooding risk in the United States. The nonprofit organization also released an online tool that can tell you the current flood risk for your home and how that risk may increase due to environmental and climate change.

If you enter your address or zip-code into Flood Factor you can view a detailed report into whether your area has flooded in the past, the current local flooding conditions and the future risk of flooding. Interactive maps are used by Flood Factor to show the local areas most at risk of flooding and the severity of that risk.

In many countries around the world government agencies provide flood risk maps. The UK government's Long Term Flood Risk Map for England, for example, provides an overview of the chances that any location in England will flood in any year. It shows the chances of flooding from either surface water, groundwater or from rivers or the sea. 

In the USA FEMA's Flood Map Service allows you to view a flood risk map for any address in the country. Enter your address into the Flood Map Service and it will automatically generate a flood risk map, showing you where there are current and future flood risks in the area. The map also provides an overall assessment of the level of flood risk in the area.

The Sexist Streets of Italy

There are roughly 16,500 streets and squares in Rome. 7,892 of those streets and squares have been named for people. The vast majority of the streets and squares which have been named for people have been named after men. 7,364 of the 7,892 streets in Rome named for people are named after men and only 528 streets have been name for women. This inequality in street naming is repeated in every one of Italy's major cities. 

Mapping Diversity is a fascinating analysis and visualization of the street names of Italy. Using Mapping Diversity you can discover how many streets in Italy's major cities are named for women compared to how many streets have been named after men. The visualization analyzes more than 40,000 streets in the main city in each of Italy’s regions. 

In Mapping Diversity's analysis of Italy's major cities only 6.6% of streets named after people have been dedicated to women. 1,626 streets in total have been named for women in all of Italy's major cities. If you exclude the streets named after female saints then the number is only 959. Of Italy's major cities Bolzano has the highest percentage of streets named for women. However even in Bolzano only 13% of streets named after people are named for women.

Using Mapping Diversity you can view dedicated maps of each main city in each of Italy's regions. On these maps you can view all the streets named for people. You can see how many of these streets named for people in each city have been named for men and how many have been after women. 

You can learn more about the methodology behind Mapping Diversity's analysis and how the maps were created on Finding gendered street names. A step-by-step walkthrough with R. 

Geochicas has been at the forefront of efforts around the world to reveal the under-representation of women in place-names. Their Las Calles de las Mujeres is an interactive map which reveals all the streets named for men and women in a number of cities in Spain, Argentina, Mexico, Bolivia, Cuba, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay. 

A number of other interactive mapping projects have explored the sexist culture of naming streets in cities around the world: 

Street Names in Vienna visualizes all the streets named for men and women in the Austrian capital.
From Pythagoras to Amalia analyzes 5,400 Amsterdam street names - including exploring how many are named for women compared to the number named after men.
Recognizing Women with Canadian Place Names shows 500 locations in Canada which have been named for women from lots of different backgrounds. 

In Europe EqualStreetNames has carried out an analysis of the diversity of street names in a number of European cities:  

• EqualStreetNames: Berlin 
• EqualStreetNames: Belgrade
• EqualStreetNames: Assen
• EqualStreetNames: Gronigen
• EqualStreetNames: Brussels 
• EqualStreetNames: Leipzig
  

European Flood Maps

Over recent days high levels of precipitation across parts of Central and Northern Europe have led to devastating levels of flooding. This has resulted in a number of deaths in Germany and Belgium, while parts of Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Switzerland have also been effected by dangerous floods. Since Monday a persistent area of low pressure has caused heavy rainfall across Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and the Netherlands. This has caused many rivers to burst their banks and dozens of people have been killed in the floods.

Germany's Flood Portal shows the current state of flooding in the entire country. The site includes a national river gauge map which visualizes river levels across the country. This map currently shows high water levels in western parts of North Rhine-Westphalia. The Flood Portal website also provides links to the German Weather Service's weather warning maps and to a German Flood risk map.

Switzerland's national mapping service includes a flood alert map layer which allows you to see where lakes and rivers in the country currently have a flood alert. This layer colors rivers and lakes to show the current flood hazard. There are currently flood alerts on many lakes and rivers in Switzerland, including Lake Geneva and Lake Neuchatel. 

In Belgium the government's flood service Waterinfo Belge includes a current situation map. This map shows the current measurements for river gauges and a short term and longer term forecast of flood levels. If you navigate to the home page of Waterinfo you can view all the latest flood warnings for the country, as well as the current warning levels for tides and rainfall.Water levels in South-Eastern Belgium remain dangerously high.

California Wildfires Maps

 

California had its worst ever fire season last year. This year's fire season will probably end up being even worse.If you want news on the latest wildfires currently active in the state then you can refer to these California wildfire maps:

Fire Activity

The University of California's Fire Activity interactive map provides information on the latest wildfire activity in the state of California. The map uses satellite detection systems to detect the latest wildfire hotspots. It also provides fire perimeter information from on-the-ground information and from aerial sensors.

LA Times' California Wildfires Map

If you want to keep up-to-date with the current wildfires burning in California then you can also refer to the LA Times' California Wildfires Map. The LA Times map uses data from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellites and from Calfire to show the locations of all the current wildfires in the state. The interactive map shows the best guess location of each fire's origin, the latest known fire extents and hotspots showing locations where fires are suspected according to satellite imagery analysis.

ALERTWildfire

The ALERTWildfire system uses live cameras to detect, locate and confirm wildfires. The system can also be used to monitor fire behavior and help firefighters tackle fires on the ground. The ALERTWildfire system is being developed by a consortium of the University of Nevada, the University of California and the University of Oregon. The system is currently operational in a number of locations in California, Idaho, Nevada and Oregon.

Open Map

Clarity Movement, an environmental startup who specialize in air pollution, have released an interactive map which shows information on both the location of wildfires in California and on the latest air pollution data. Open Map uses data from NASA's Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) to show the latest information on active wildfires. Air quality is shown using data from AirNow (which monitors data from local air quality agencies across the country). 

The California Forest Observatory

The California Forest Observatory uses AI and satellite imagery to map tree extent and canopy density in California. The map is designed to provide up-to-date and accurate forest information to help predict where and how fast wildfires might spread in the state and in what direction. The map can also be used as a forest management tool, in order to plan and implement fire prevention measures.  The map includes a real-time animated wind layer, which shows the intensity and direction of current wind in the state. An additional Fire Hot Spots layer visualizes current wildfire hot-spots using data from VIIRS.

The Building Heights of the Netherlands

Bert Spaan's Netherland's Building Age Map, created for the Waag website, is one of my favorite interactive maps. This map visualizes the age of a staggering 9,866,539 buildings in the Netherlands. The amount of data visualized on this map is very impressive in itself but its use of distinct colors for buildings of different construction ages means that the map also has a very striking visual impact.  

The Netherlands Building Height map is a similarly impressive interactive map. On this interactive map all Dutch buildings are colored, not to show their year of construction but to visualize their height. All the buildings are also displayed in 3D, which gives an additional visual clue to their relative heights. If you want to find out a building's exact height you can also click on its 3D model on the map.

The Netherlands Building Height map uses data and 3D building outlines from TU Delft's 3D BAG. This is an open 3D building data set which covers the whole of the Netherlands.This data was also used to create Parallel's Netherlands Building Ages interactive map.

Inspired by Bert Spaan's building age map Parallel used the 3D BAG data to create the Netherlands Building Ages interactive map which shows both the age of 10 million buildings in the Netherlands but the height of those buildings as well. This map makes use of Mapbox's GL extrude property to visualize the height of all the buildings in the Netherlands in 3D. The colors of the buildings on this map however indicate their age. You can also hover individual buildings to learn a its exact year of construction.

The Building Age Map of Manhattan

Building age maps provide a useful guide to how cities have developed over time. One of the most interesting cities in the world is New York and the Manhattan Building Age map provides a fascinating insight into the history of construction in one of the most densely packed urban centers in the world. 

There are over 1 million buildings in New York City. Some of the city's oldest buildings date back as far as the early 1700's, while some of the city's most famous buildings, including the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building, originate in the building boom of the early 20th Century.

The Manhattan Building Age map includes a filter control which allows you to view only buildings constructed during specific dates. This colorful mapped visualization also includes a timeline graph showing how many buildings were built in each decade. This timeline reveals that the first 30 years of the 20th Century were the city's busiest period of construction.

  

You can also explore the age of New York's buildings on the New York Construction interactive map. This animated map shows the major periods of construction in New York since 1880.

New York Construction provides a great insight into which areas of New York were developed in each decade of the Twentieth Century. The map allows you to select any year since 1880 and view all the buildings in New York which were built in the 50 years immediately before your chosen date. Press the play button and you can view an animation showing all the buildings constructed in the previous 50 years of the current date on the map. In this way the map shows the major areas of construction in New York over the last 50 years from the date selected. The buildings are color-coded on the map to show how near to the selected date that they were constructed.

You can also view the age of all of New York's current buildings on NYC's Pluto Data Map. This map color-codes all the buildings by their year of construction. You can therefore use this map to see which neighborhoods have the oldest buildings in New York and which neighborhoods are made up of predominantly newer buildings. 

 

You can find many other interactive building age maps for other major cities around the world under the Maps Mania building age tag.

A Tour of the Irish Border

We need to talk about the border is an interactive story map which takes you on a multi-media tour of the Irish border. Since the Good Friday Agreement in 1988 there has been only a soft border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. 

The border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland is the only land border between the UK and the EU. Now that the United Kingdom has left the European Union the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland has by default become an external EU border. In theory it could once more become a hard border to support the infrastructure necessary to maintain custom checks for goods and people entering and leaving the EU. 

Elisabeth Blanchet & Laurent Gontier have traveled around the Irish border taking photographs and interviewing the people they met on the journey. 'We need to talk about the border' is an interactive story map which takes you on a photo-tour of the border. Overall the interviews with local people living along the border leaves you with a sense that there is an overwhelming sense of anger with the UK government for endangering the peace stemming from the Good Friday Agreement. 

 

In 2019 The Guardian created an animated map to show how much traffic passes across the Irish border every day. The Guardian's animated map visualizes the traffic crossing the border at 10 different locations during one hour on Monday 2nd, September 2019. A Typical Hour in the Life of the Irish Border uses data from under-wheel sensors at ten different locations on the border. The animated map helps to visualize the amount of activity on the Irish border. Traffic and trade which is likely to be seriously disrupted and slowed if a hard border is reintroduced between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. 

 

The 1998 Belfast Agreement played an integral part in ending the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The worry is that a return to a hard border would destabilize the Belfast Agreement and could even reignite anger and violence. If anyone is in any doubt about the level of violence experienced along the old hard border between the Republic and Northern Ireland they should check out the Irish Times' Explore the Border interactive map.

Explore the Border maps a sample of just some of the border incidents experienced during the Troubles. Click on a marker on the map and you are taken to one of the old crossings along the border. The map sidebar reports on any major violent incidents which occurred at this crossing. The number of bombings, shootings and arson attacks are also listed.

Explore the Border also uses Google Street View images of each mapped crossing on the border. This allows you to explore the border for yourself and highlights how a hard border would not only be difficult to implement but would be an ugly scar on a very beautiful country. 

 

Keith O’Faoláin has created an animated movie of the Irish border, Oh Border Where Art Thou. The movie uses satellite imagery to explore the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.Watching the movie it is very apparent that the current border is very 'soft'. There are very few hard geographical barriers between the Republic and Northern Ireland. Mostly the border just follows roads and fields.

The European Union and the United Kingdom have signed up to the Northern Ireland Protocol. An agreement that there will be no new checks on goods crossing the Irish border. Unionist and pro-Brexit politicians in Northern Ireland have tried to overturn the Northern Ireland Protocol, including trying to persuade the High Court of Northern Ireland to declare the Protocol unlawful.

The Most Beautiful Views in the World

This is the most beautiful view in the world. And that isn't just my personal opinion but has been scientifically proven using computer algorithms and machine learning.

In actual fact this view of Mount Paul from the Maligne Lake in Canada is 1 of 256 individual Street View images which have been chosen to showcase the work of Creatism, a deep-learning system designed to improve images of landscape views.Creatism uses a number of image enhancement techniques to improve existing images so that they are of a similar standard to images taken by professional photographers.

The 256 images on the Creatism website were chosen from 40,000 Google Maps Street View images. The Creatism machine learning algorithms were then used to improve these Google Street View images by applying cropping, enhancing colors & hues and by adding dramatic masks to the images.

The Creatism website is certainly full of many beautiful images derived from Google Street View. You should be able to click on any of the 256 images on the Creatism website to compare the AI enhance image with the original Google Maps Street View. However if you click on an image the original Street View image is obscured and carries the ugly message 'For development purposes only'. As is increasingly the case with maps created with the Google Maps API, the underlying maps are broken because the developer no longer wants to pay Google's expensive fees. 

 

In the early days of Google Maps Street View MIT and OpenPlans both devised methodologies for surveying people's responses to urban environments as seen on Google's interactive panoramic imagery. These surveys were designed to discover what aspects of the urban environment people find 'beautiful', 'safe' or 'unique' by rating Street View images. Unfortunately the websites for both the MIT and OpenPlans projects no longer seem to exist.

The River Basins of Central Europe

Central European River Basins is an interactive map which visualizes the major river systems of Central Europe using different colors. The map reveals which major watersheds all the streams, brooks and rivers of Central Europe flow into.

OpenStreetMap (OSM) data was used to create this interactive River Basin Map. On OSM all waterways are given a unique ID number. If two waterways are connected to each other, then they have a common node that can be clearly identified from their ID number. In this way Martin Kompf. the map's creator, was able to identify all the waterways on OSM associated with each major river system in Central Europe. 

If you are interested in exploring interactive visualizations of watersheds in other locations around the world then you might enjoy these maps:

The Watersheds Map allows you to visualize watershed regions throughout the USA. As you mouse-over the map it automatically updates to show upstream areas in red and downstream areas in blue. The map allows you to visualize over 100,000 watershed regions in the United States.

The Watershed Explorer interactive map allows you to click anywhere in the world to view all of its upstream areas and the downstream flow.When you click on this map a high-resolution digital elevation model is used to calculate the flow direction that water would take at every point on the surrounding land. The map then follows "these directions to calculate the region that contributes to a single outlet".

The USGS's Streamer map allows you to trace rivers or streams upstream to their source or downstream to their final destinations in the USA. The interactive map can create very dramatic visualizations of river watersheds, particularly when you trace a river upstream to show all of its tributaries.

The SubTel Cable Map

The SubTel Cable Map plots over 400 in-service and planned cable systems around the world. If you select an individual cable service on the map you can view details on its length, capacity, and ownership.The map also includes a number of filter controls which allow you to explore the world's cable infrastructure by region, system supplier, system installer or owner. 

The map is created by the SubTel Cables Forum and is continually updated by using data from the SubTel Forum and the feedback from its users.Subsea cables carry telecommunication signals under the oceans, communicating information between different countries and regions of the world. In the 19th Century the first submarine cables were laid to carry telegraphy traffic. In the 21st Century submarine cables carry digital data, which includes telephone and Internet data.

Every year Telegeography also releases an interactive map of the global network of undersea telecommunication cables which carries our data around the world.The 2021 Submarine Cable Map is this year's edition of the map.

The Telegeography interactive map shows 464 cables and 1,245 landing stations. The map also features lots of textual information, featuring both cable trivia and answers to FAQ's about cable suppliers, content providers, fiber etc. For example - did you know that there are now over 1.3 kilometers of underwater cables around the world (if they were laid end-to-end they could wrap around the world 30 times). 

Who Isn't Getting Vaccinated?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has created a bivariate map which visualizes both vaccination rates and the Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) at the county level. The COVID-19 Vaccination Equity map shows both the levels of vaccination coverage in each county and the levels of SVI.

The SVI uses data on poverty levels, housing, and vehicle access to estimate a community’s ability to respond to and recover from disasters or disease outbreaks. For example the index can be used to identify areas which are most likely to be adversely effected by epidemics such as Covid-19.

The reddest counties on the map are those with the highest SVI scores and the lowest vaccination coverage. For example much of the Black Belt in the American South appears red on the map. Black Belt counties have historically ranked toward the bottom of American regions for quality of life indicators such as poverty, income levels and mortality rates. These counties are now among those with the lowest vaccination rates.

Covid-19 vaccinations are extremely important in preventing deaths from the highly transmissible variants of the disease now emerging. Last Thursday the director of the CDC, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, announced that over the last few months 99.5% of deaths from Covid-19 in the United States were in unvaccinated people. Estimates from the CDC show that the highly transmissible Delta variant now makes up more than half of Covid cases in the US.

The New York Times' Covid-19 Vaccinations interactive map allows you to see the percentage of the population who are vaccinated in each county. On this map lighter hues show the counties with the lowest rates of vaccinations. 

Around 67% of Americans have now received at least one shot of the vaccine. Louisiana (49.6%) and Mississippi (47.2%) are the two states with the lowest percentage of adults having received at least one shot.

McKinsey & Company has a bivariate map which visualizes both the percentage of the population in every county who have received a Covid-19 vaccination and the number of active cases of Covid-19 in each county. This map reveals the clear link between low vaccination rates and active cases of Covid-19.

McKinsey's Covid-19 Vaccine Distribution map uses the color red to show the counties with the lowest percentage of the population vaccinated and with a high rate of coronavirus. The turquoise color on this map shows counties with high vaccination rates and low numbers of active Covid-19 cases.If a county was dark blue on this map it would indicate a high level of vaccination and a high number of Covid-19 cases. The absence of counties colored dark blue suggests that vaccinations are very effective in controlling the spread of Covid-19.