Location is Personal: Issue 4, April 2019
Using data to understand our planet
Special thanks to our very own Captain Planet, Elijah Zarlin, and Mapbox’s Community Team, Marena Brinkhurst and Mikel Maron for helping us create this issue of Location is Personal.
As humans, we rely heavily on what we can directly see, smell, touch. Consequently, our physical home, our relationship to the land, and the observable changes around us influence our understanding of the world.
But our reliance solely on personal experience as the source of truth can leave us vulnerable to falsehoods and confusion. You’ve probably heard someone say, “If the planet is getting warmer, why is there so much snow outside?” This becomes dangerous when unsubstantiated beliefs are used as justification for governmental policies.
The basic science of climate change is simple. Its references in science go back to 1896. This concise explanation appeared in a New Zealand newspaper in 1912. But only in March of this year, for the first time in 40 years of Gallup polling, did a majority of Americans respond as being materially concerned about it. After a string of “natural” disasters and catastrophes have touched more and more people, personal experience may finally be starting to catch up.
Even for people who worry about this a lot, it’s hard to know what to do. As individuals today, we’re bombarded with scientific findings, new doomsday articles, other articles saying we shouldn’t scare people, plus a blizzard of ludicrous nonsense. And try as we may to drive less or eat less meat, it can seem like it’s never enough, and you’re pushing against the tide. This is actually by design.
So how do we push past first-hand empirical knowledge? One way is to promote transparency and support scientific research. At Mapbox, our Community Team is dedicated to supporting scientists and environmental advocates as they visualize the problems the planet is currently facing.
The team has actively helped with projects like Headwaters Economics’ San Luis Valley Wildfire Risk, an interactive project exploring watersheds, wildfire, and the wildland-urban interface in Colorado’s San Luis Valley. Or this live marine life tracker from Citizens of the Great Barrier Reef, where you can track the live migrations of turtles, sharks, whale sharks, and manta rays.
The key to unlocking these resources is digitalization. Pulling this data out of spreadsheets, PDFs, paper maps, and other raster formats so we can visualize solutions, connections, and patterns more dynamically. The USGS took this approach to communicate the growth of wind power across the US with their Wind Turbine Database project and its dynamic map. Similarly, Global Forest Watch has made its data explorable via a huge mapping effort. If technology can save money for big companies routing trucks and delivering packages, can the mass digitization and visualization of data impact the way we view climate change and conservation?
We want to work with more people whose work focuses on understanding and impacting conservation, climate change, and environmental justice spaces. You can reach out to the team for more info. If you are a developer interested in building environmental data projects, you can join the Mapbox Developer Network so organizations can contact you about what they want to build. And if you’ve ever wanted to do some visualizations but couldn’t find the data, check out BuzzFeed’s Jeremy Singer-Vine’s giant list of datasets!
What we’re reading
- Youth Climate Strike as seen by Teen Photographers, WIRED
- “Why Fixing Africa’s Data Gaps Will Lead to Better Health Policies”, The Conversation
- WIRED’s “Guide to Climate Change”
- “Inside the Daring Plan to Map Every Coral Reef From Space”, National Geographic
- Visit the surface of Antarctica without leaving your home with the code available here
- A neat reading list on women and climate change
- This must-see interactive about Bears Ears from The Washington Post
- “A Guide to Every Permitted Natural Gas Well in West Virginia,” ProPublica
- Visualizing life expectancy can tell us loads about the environment, from Quartz
Who we’re following
- Italian Limes, a project mapping the moving border across Italy’s glaciers
- Our very own Damon Burgett, jack of all trades, ace at some. Geography and Imagery at Mapbox
- Zack Labe, Climate Scientist and PhD candidate at the Department of Earth System Science (ESS) at the University of California, Irvine. Check out his work
- Leanne Abraham, data viz at Planet. Making maps and learning things at the University of Wisconsin
What we’re building
- This Game of Thrones-inspired map (build your own!)
- The Vision SDK is now open for everyone!
- Updated GL-geocoder plugin for more customizable search
- Build-your-own asset tracking solution
Developer Spotlight
Roque Leal is a Data Scientist and Software Developer in Ecuador. His current project, World Oil Map, is an independent, open source initiative to visualize data on the oil and gas sector, including announcements about licensing rounds and discoveries of hydrocarbon deposits. He hopes making these data sets easier to understand will improve the transparency of oil development and environmental protection decisions. Contributors are encouraged to help build out the data and features of the World Oil Map.
Mapbox Events
- Maptime Mobile Mapping at Mapbox SF | April 16
- Mapbox Live: What is Mapbox Studio? | April 17
- Mapbox Live: Solving transport challenges with Navigation | April 18
- Tableau User Group at Mapbox SF | April 24
- Micromobility Panel at Mapbox SF | May 1
- Gov User Meetup at Mapbox DC | May 8
Mapbox Jobs
- Sales Engineer Manager
- Engineering Manager, Platform
- GIS Developer, Enterprise Boundaries
- Web Developer
Location is Personal is a monthly newsletter by Mapbox, from the desks of Lo Bénichou and Amy Lee Walton. We’re exploring how the human experience shapes the spatial experience. Want to start getting this newsletter in your inbox each month? Sign up here.
Location is Personal: Issue 4, February 2019 was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.