Interactive Theme Park Maps

Kolmården Wildlife Park is Sweden's largest zoo. The park includes a dolphinarium, a cable car safari and two roller coasters. The Kolmården Wildlife Park website also includes a wonderful interactive park map.

The Kolmården Wildlife Park Karta shows the location of all the park's themed areas using an oblique stylized bird's eye view of the park. If you select any of the markers on the map you can drill down to view images of each of the park's separate areas. These close-up views include information about the animals that can be seen in each area and the facilities available to the park's visitors.

Each of these smaller area maps provide beautifully designed bird's eye views of the park. These images include little animations, often involving the animals themselves. You can click on most of the animals to learn more about these species in the park.


If you like park maps then you might also enjoy Disney's Walt Disney World map. Walt Disney's map uses the Google Maps API's Ground Overlay feature to overlay a custom made static map on top of the Google Maps base layer. This is a great way to create an impressive looking, distinctive map.

Of course to create such good looking park maps you need to start with a good custom designed static map. Luckily many theme parks already have beautifully designed static maps. It doesn't take too much effort to use these static maps as the basis for great interactive maps to help showcase a theme park on the Internet.

The Modern Plague of London

In 1886 the National Temperance Publication Depot published a map of London pubs "as specified in the London Directory". The Modern Plague of London map shows the location of London pubs as listed in the directory. To create the map the National Temperance Publication Depot simply added a red dot for every London pub to a print of Bacon's Map of London & Suburbs.

The map owes an obvious debt to John Snow's map of cholera victims in Soho during the 1854 cholera outbreak. By plotting the homes of cholera victims on a map Snow was able to identify a water pump in Broad Street as the cause of all the cases of cholera. Snow's map essentially proved that cholera was spread by contaminated water and disproved the prevailing miasma theory, which believed that diseases like cholera were caused by bad air.

By plotting all of the pubs in London the National Temperance Publication Depot presumably intended to identify all the contaminated sources of alcoholism in London. Unfortunately for the temperance movement the map wasn't particularly successful in achieving its aim of eradicating the modern plague of London. Previous attempts to limit Londoner's access to their pubs had proven spectacularly unsuccessful. For example the Sale of Beer Act in 1854, which restricted Sunday opening hours, had to be repealed after widespread rioting. It was unlikely then that a simple map of London pubs was going to be enough to stop people drinking alcohol in London.

However the map is very successful in visualizing the huge number of pubs in Victorian London. The highest resolution image of the map that I can find online was published by the Telegraph (accompanying this article). If you examine the map you can find lots of streets where every other building appears to be a public house. If you already believed that alcohol was a scourge on the general population then the National Temperance Publication Depot's map of the Modern Plague of London would be very likely to confirm your beliefs about the immense dangers of alcohol to the population of London.

The Map of Your Heart

There are a few online sellers of customized map posters. For example Mapiful allows you to create and order large prints of your favorite locations around the world. Map Poster similarly allows you to create and buy your own map poster for any location that you choose. You can even create and design a beautiful map background for your phone with Alvar Carto's Map Backgrounds.

Happy Maps has a nice unique take on the customized map poster market. Happy Maps features the same easy to use tools for making a customized map as Mapiful and Map Poster. However a Happy Map creates a heart shaped map. A Happy Map would therefore make a great map present for your significant other, featuring the place where you first met, proposed or got married.

Grafomap is another website where you can create high quality personalized map posters. Using the customized Grafomap map tool you can search for any place in the world and design your own map poster featuring your chosen location.

Not THAT Election Map

After his election President Donald Trump was quick to hang a 2016 election map up in the West Wing. This electoral college map is mostly colored red with a few splashes of blue reflecting how the country's electoral districts voted.  While looking at this map Trump can temporarily forget he lost the popular vote and pretend that he is universally loved across the United States.

However not all election maps tell the same story. The Presidential election 2016: dasymetric dot density map is a dot map of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. On the map one dot equals one vote. So one red dot equals one vote for the Republican candidate and one blue vote equals one vote for the Democratic candidate.

This dot map provides a much better visualization of the overall number of votes for each candidate, compared to the electoral college map. It allows us to see where Trump (or Clinton) actually did dominate the vote and where voting was much more even.

The map was created by Kenneth Field and you can read more about how the map was made on his Cartonerd blog.

The European Trade in Hazardous Waste

Over 90 % of hazardous waste exports in the European Union are shipped to other EU Member States. This could prove a problem for the UK after Brexit. The UK is by far the biggest exporter of hazardous waste. I wonder what kind of trade negotiations will have to take place to ensure that the Netherlands continues to take 1,607,602 tonnes of hazardous waste from the UK after the country leaves the EU.

Eurostat's Interactive Map on Waste Shipment visualizes how much hazardous waste each country in Europe exports and imports every year. If you select an EU country on the map you can see all the other countries around the world that it ships hazardous waste to. You can also view all the countries that a country imports hazardous waste from. The total tonnage exported or imported is shown for the top 5 countries that import or export waste from the selected country.

Australia's Solar Potential Map

A new interactive map from the University of New South Wales, the Australian Photovoltaic Institute, Solar Analytics and Enosi shows the potential for rooftop solar power for homes in a number of Australian cities. The SunSPoT Solar Potential Map allows home owners to zoom in on their homes to work how much energy they might be able to generate by installing rooftop solar panels.

If you zoom in on your home on the map you can draw around the outline of your roof. SunSPoT will then automatically work out an estimation of the potential power that could be generated from solar power and the value of all that energy. If you click on the 'rack mounting' button you can experiment with the tilt and direction of your future solar panels to view how this might effect their solar potential.

You can find out how many homes already have solar power on another interactive map. The Australian Photovoltaic Installations map visualizes the estimated percentage of dwellings that have a PV system and the total photovoltaic capacity installed for each each postcode and local government area in Australia. Select an area on this map and you can view an estimation of the total number of dwellings, the number of dwellings with PV installations and the annual energy generated from PV in the area.

America's News Deserts

Wikipedia's List of Defunct Newspapers of the United States includes the names of over 1,000 newspapers which are no longer in print. Many of these papers collapsed decades ago. However a large proportion of these newspapers are victims of the loss of 50% of print newspaper readers in the last 20 years.

Last year the Colombia Journalism Review mapped out America's Growing News Deserts. Their map shows the number of local newspapers left in each county in the United States. One thing that the map reveals is that a lot of counties no longer have a single local newspaper in print.

Ohio University has now released a new interactive map which visualizes the circulation of daily newspapers and the percentage of the population that subscribe to newspapers. The Media Deserts Map includes two choropleth layers. One layer shows the number of daily newspapers in a county and the other shows the circulation penetration. Using the map it is possible to see the number of daily newspapers in a county and the percent of the population (over the age of 18) who are reading them.

Mapping Britain's Ups & Downs

The Relative Land Motion map showing subsidence on Wanstead Flats in East London

A new interactive map of the United Kingdom plots very small changes in elevation to show where the country is experiencing subsidence and where the land is experiencing uplift. Zoom in on any location on the Relative Land Motion Map of the UK and you can find out whether an area saw any warping of the land surface between 2015 and 2017.

On the interactive map areas colored red have experienced subsidence and areas colored blue have seen uplift. These small movements in land surface have been detected by comparing imagery captured by the Sentinel-1 satellite. Satellite interferometry has been used to detect small changes in different satellite images of the same location. In this way it is possible to show where the land surface has experienced subsidence or uplift over time.

In the UK most changes to the levels of the land surface are caused by "groundwater levels, underground mining, landslides, surface erosion (such as in open-cast mines) and soil compression (such as in drained peatlands)".

On the interactive map some examples of areas that have seen changes to land surface levels have been highlighted on the map. The white rectangles show areas where mining, civil engineering projects or geological features have caused significant subsidence or uplift. ​If you select one of these rectangles on the map a small information window will open explaining why the area has experienced warping of the land surface.

The World at Night

NASA's Black Marble map of the Earth at night is the best way to view the distribution of artificial lights around the world. The Black Marble is a composite map made up of the best cloud-free satellite images of the Earth taken at night.

Cities at Night think that they can actually improve on NASA's Black Marble map. This citizen science project is using crowd-sourcing to identify the locations in night-time photographs of the Earth captured by astronauts on board the International Space Station. NASA has almost half a million of these pictures now. Many of them provide much higher definition aerial night-time views of towns and cities across the globe than can be found on the Black Marble map.

You can contribute to this new night-time map of the Earth by helping Cities at Night classify the locations in the photographs taken by astronauts from the ISS. You can also browse the 2,500 photographs classified so far on this map. The map shows the locations of night time images taken from the ISS identified by volunteers of Cities at Night.

What Kills Americans & Where

FiveThirtyEight has updated its U.S. mortality rates map to cover more categories of disease and causes of death. The 35 Years of American Death map shows the mortality rates in each county for the leading causes of death in the United States. The new causes of death added to the map include nine categories of chronic respiratory disease, four categories of infectious disease, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, self-harm, interpersonal violence, alcohol use and drug use.

FiveThirtyEight's map shows that there are some geographical trends in the mortality rates associated with many causes of death. In fact we don't even to have to look at individual causes of death to see that many counties in rural Appalachia have very high mortality rates. If you want to know why the mortality rate is so high in these counties then look at the cancer and substance abuse mortality rates in these counties.

In More Americans Are Dying From Suicide, Drug Use And Diarrhea FiveThirtyEight uses the data from its map to visualize some of the changes in mortality rates for a number of diseases between 1980 and 2014. These maps show the counties in the USA where the visualized diseases have grown or fallen significantly over the last 30 years.