Spatial Awareness #13 — Maps & Spatial Newsletter by Robin Hawkes

I have a soft spot for 3D visualisations of public transport, I suppose because my first major spatial visualisation was the London Underground in 3D with animated trains in realtime. Fast forward nearly 7 years and this recent visualisation of realtime public transport in Tokyo by Akihiko Kusanagi gives me all sorts of nostalgia. Lovely stuff!

Arguably my favourite season of the year, Autumn can completely transform a landscape through the changing colours of leaves. This map by The Washington Post visualises the types of forests across the United States and the colours you might find there. I also like the side-visualisation of leaf types and colours.

Infrastructure is fascinating to me, especially when it requires taking a step back to comprehend the sheer scale and complexity of it. The Open Infrastructure Map by Russ Garrett is a fantastic project which takes infrastructure data from OpenStreetMap and visualises it on an interactive map. I find this fascinating as it’s the kind of data you wouldn’t otherwise see on a map generated from OpenStreetMap data. I wonder what other hidden data exists!

It looks like being adopted by the OGC has opened the doors for various organisations to declare standard support for the GeoTIFF format, like NASA’s Earth Observation data.

This six-minute video from Vox takes a whimsical look at why flat maps are distorted and comparing that distortion between projections. It’s angled more towards people new to maps but its slick production value makes it interesting nonetheless.

This could be my favourite spatial software release of the year — it’s certainly near the top of the list! What is it? It’s Aerialod by ephtracy, a lovely tool that takes elevation data and uses a path-tracing renderer to produce stunning 3D visualisations. There are already a huge amount of amazing visualisations that people have created using this tool, which are all well worth taking a look at.

It’s finally here! The official release of PostGIS 3.0.0 has been announced, packed full of new features and performance improvements. This is a big update for anyone who use vector tiles, GeoJSON or want to benefit from the upgrade to PROJ 6. Follow the link above and read the full list of changes as there’s so much more in this release.

If you’ve ever wanted to export maps from QGIS to the Web then you need to check out qgis2web by Tom Chadwin. This plugin has historically supported exporting your maps as Leaflet or OpenLayer maps, and has recently added support for exporting maps using Mapbox GL JS.

It’s so easy to forget that digital isn’t the only way that spatial data can be produced and consumed. I’m guilty of this myself and it’s something I’m hoping to improve upon in the future, even if just printing more of the maps that I create. Or how about drawing maps without touching a computer? This tutorial by Sarah Bell details her process for drawing hillshades by hand using actual pencils and paper. Incredible stuff!

Craig Taylor strikes again with a series of beautiful animated visualisations for TomTom as part of his work at Ito World. The visualisations look at GPS data across the city of Amsterdam and how it can be used to tell a compelling story. The linked article takes a look at how these visualisations were created and the journey Craig took from initial concepts to final production.

This in-depth article by Georgios Karnas takes a look at the issue of coordinate precision faced by Uber for Deck.gl, their 3D spatial visualisation library. Specifically, Georgios digs into the limitations of floating-point precision in WebGL shaders and details how they worked around those limitations to accurately transform coordinates on the fly without sacrificing performance.

A new high-resolution DEM has been released that covers the entire Canadian Arctic. The new data has 2 metre resolution, compared to 5 metres previously. The data has been released as part of the ArcticDEM project.

This fascinating dataset contains the track data for historic tropical cyclones worldwide, from way back in 1841 all the way to the present day. The dataset is updated weekly with the more recent data (later than 1980) being the most accurate, having come from the era of modern satellite observation.

This week saw the start of Topi Tjukanov’s #30DayMapChallenge. The general idea is that for each day of November you create something with spatial data and share it with the wider community. The catch is that each day has a specific theme that acts as both an inspirational aid as well as a constraint.

For most people there’s probably no chance of creating something different every single day in November, and that’s completely fine. The premise is to have fun and step out of your comfort zone by following the themes. You can submit as many or as few maps as you have time for over the month.

The entries so far have been truly inspirational and you can see them for yourself by following the #30DayMapChallenge hashtag on Twitter.

Sentinel Hub are running a competition until January 15th to develop scripts that use satellite data through the Sentinel Hub EO Browser. The first prize is €1,000 and you’re able to submit up to 3 scripts within the competition.

If you’re looking for a spatial job then look no further than the Geoawesomeness jobs portal. They compile the latest and greatest jobs from around the world, from companies big and small. The list is updated regularly so it’s worth keeping an eye on.

I’ve featured Sarah Bell a couple of times since this newsletter started, first for her great climbing map for the MonoCarto competition earlier in the year, and also within this issue for her tutorial on hand-drawn hillshade using pencils and paper. Sarah also presented recently at NACIS 2019 on drawing hillshade by hand and you can watch the video of that on YouTube.

You can also find Sarah as part of Petrichor Studio where you can see more examples of her amazing work. 👌