The Online Journalism Blog has created media attention cartograms that show how the world looks from the point of view of different news sources. Cartograms that distort the world by population look quite different:
via Ethan Zuckerman
Tag Archives: map
Global and National Malaria Maps
Malaria Atlas Project used national reports, ecological and epidemological models to create a new global map of P. falciparum malaria risk. Guerra et al 2008 PLoS Medicine estimate that 2.37 billion people live in areas at risk of P. falciparum transmission. However, almost a billion people of those people live in areas with only episodic or very low risk of malaria exposuire suggesting there in substantial possibility of eliminating malaria from these areas. Almost all areas with high risk are in Africa.
Below is a small version of their global map of P. Falciparium (the most dangerous species) of Malaria risk for 2007:
Their maps can be viewed in google earth, as country maps, or as as an ArcGrid file at 0.1 degree spatial resolution.
Mapping Coastal Eutrophication
Current industrial agricultural practices produce a tradeoff between agricultural production and the quality of coastal ecosystems, because agricultural fertilizers that increase crop yields lead to the creation of low oxygen hypoxic areas in areas which receive a lot of nutrient rich runoff.
The World Resources Institute and Virginia Institute of Marine Science, has updated Diaz et al’s recent map of coastal eutrophication. They identify 169 hypoxic areas, 233 areas of concern, and 13 systems in recovery.
The WRI Earthtrends weblog writes about the project:
The map shows three types of eutrophic zones:
(1) Documented hypoxic areas – Areas with scientific evidence that hypoxia was caused, at least in part, by an overabundance of nitrogen and phosphorus. Hypoxic areas have oxygen levels low enough to inhibit the existence of marine life.
(2) Areas of concern – Systems that exhibit effects of eutrophication, including elevated nitrogen and phosphorus levels, elevated chlorophyll levels, harmful algal blooms, changes in the benthic community, damage to coral reefs, and fish kills. These systems are impaired by nutrients and are possibly at risk of developing hypoxia. Some of the systems may already be experiencing hypoxia, but lack conclusive scientific evidence of the condition.
(3) Systems in recovery – Areas that once exhibited low dissolved oxygen levels and hypoxia, but are now improving. For example, the Black Sea recovery is largely due to the economic collapse of Eastern Europe in the 1990s, which greatly reduced fertilizer use. Others, like Boston Harbor in the United States and the Mersey Estuary in the United Kingdom also have improved water quality resulting from better industrial and wastewater controls.
Given the state of global data, the actual number of eutrophic and hypoxic areas around the world is likely to be greater than the 415 listed here. The most under-represented region is Asia. Asia has relatively few documented eutrophic and hypoxic areas despite large increases in intensive farming methods, industrial development, and population growth over the past 20 years. Africa, South America, and the Caribbean also have few reliable sources of coastal water quality data.
A more detailed analysis of this data set will be available in February 2008 in a policy note entitled Eutrophication and Hypoxia in Coastal Areas: A Global Assessment of the State of Knowledge (a list of related publications can be found here.
Farming the World for Food and Feed
Croplands and pastures cover about a 1/3 of the Earth’s ice free surface. Foley et al in their PNAS commentary Our share of the planetary pie illustrate the uses of this agricultural production. Their map shows the percentage of crop NPP used to produce food that humans consume directly (blue) or indirectly in processed products (orange-red). The majority of the nonfood portion is feed for livestock, but also includes fiber or luxury crops, such as cotton and coffee. Note the differences between agriculture is rich (feed for livestock) and poor countries (food).
Click on map for a larger verison.
The map is based on data from:
(In Press), Farming the Planet. 2: The Geographic Distribution of Crop Areas, Yields, Physiological Types, and NPP in the Year 2000, Global Biogeochemical Cycles, doi:10.1029/2007GB002947.
Global tropical cyclone tracks
From Wikipedia, an image of global tropical cyclone tracks (8000 x 4000 pixels).
The map shows the tracks of all Tropical cyclones which formed worldwide from 1985 to 2005. The points show the locations of the storms at six-hourly intervals and colors the points based on the hurricane strength.
Ice minima
Arctic sea ice has reached record low coverage in 2007.
From NASA EOS:
This image shows the Arctic as observed by the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for EOS (AMSR-E) aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite on September 16, 2007. In this image, blue indicates open water, white indicates high sea ice concentration, and turquoise indicates loosely packed sea ice. The black circle at the North Pole results from an absence of data as the satellite does not make observations that far north.
Three contour lines appear on this image. The red line is the 2007 minimum, as of September 15, and it almost exactly fits the sea ice observed by AMSR-E. Depending on the calculations, the minimum occurred on September 14 (one-day running average) or September 16 (five-day running average). The green line indicates the 2005 minimum, the previous record low. The yellow line indicates the median minimum from 1979 to 2000.
Global information flows
Map of international phone-call traffic in 2005, from Telegeography. The map shows the disproportionate centrality of the USA in international telephone traffic.
via Wired
Seasonal Rain Floods the Sahel
From NASA Earth Observer Seasonal Rain Floods the Sahel:
The Sahel region gets most of its rainfall between June and September when the band of near-perpetual thunderstorms that hover around the Equator shifts north. In 2007, the final months of the rainy season brought unusually heavy rainfall to East, Middle, and West Africa, causing floods in river basins from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean coasts of the continent.
This image illustrates how extensive the extreme rainfall was. The image was made with data collected by the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite between August 20 and September 21, 2007. The average daily totals recorded during this period are compared with average rainfall totals recorded during the same period since TRMM’s launch in 1997.
Regions that received more rain per day than average are blue and green, while places that received less rain would be red, orange, or yellow. The image reveals that most of the Sahel received more rain per day than average in August and September. Some places, marked with pale blue, got as much as 15 millimeters more rain than average per day. The northern Sahel, by contrast, was slightly drier than average, as indicated by its pale yellow tint.
The unusually heavy rains caused flooding in as many as 17 countries and affected more than a million people across Africa. … For those areas that escaped flooding, the rains were beneficial, since farmers in the Sahel rely on rain to water their crops, reported the Famine Early Warning System Network on September 19.
For more on the flooding see BBC news Sept 19th, and BBC news Sept 21st.
More cartograms: Population, GDP, & more
Mark Newman (see previous post Another world population map) has used his cartogram technique to make a series of sharp cartograms of the world (smoother than these rougher cartograms), some of which are shown below (land area, population, GDP, and GHG emissions):
Another world population map
Following up on the population world map post – an more detailed version of the population adjusted world map is below. It would be great to have some other distorted world maps (of wealth, health, etc) to compare this one against.
From Cartography: A popular perspective in Nature 439(800) Continue reading