Category Archives: mappings
Foundational Forests IV: All Forests are Experimental
Above is a sample of British Columbia’s Forest service’s Biogeoclimatic Ecosystem Classification (BEC) maps, which delineate Canada’s forest types and their geo-spatial patterns. The incredibly detailed classifications are based on field surveys of assemblies of vegetation, assemblies which are expected to shift in tandem with accelerated climate change. As they do, these maps will shift in […]
Drifts in Magnetic Fields
[World Magnetic Model maps notating the magnetic field's intensity (top) and inclination lines, or angle of the earth's magnetic field above or below horizontal (bottom)] [Film of a suspension of dissociated cells from trout "olfactory epithelium" (cells extracted from some unfortunate trout's nose) placed under the laboratory influence of a magnetic field rotating at a […]
Roving Curiosity Maps
[a stereoscopic terrain map of Mars, prepared by the USGS. "Use red-blue glasses (red lens over left eye) to view this three-dimensional image of a canyon eroded into strata, interpreted as sulfate beds on the flanks of Aeolis Mons in Gale crater."] In order to chart a feasible path for the wanderings of the Curiosity […]
Buoy Wave Park
[Section and model rendering of the pv150 PowerBuoy, by Ocean Power Technologies] The U.S.’s first federally approved commercial wave energy infrastructure is readying for deployment off the coast of Oregon. In an ocean array 2 miles from shore, each energy producing buoy will measure 150 feet tall by 40 feet wide, and weigh 200 tons: As interesting […]
River was: 34,131,100 points
The U.S. Geological Survey recently posted a LIDAR fly-through of what the Lower Elwha River looked like as of September 2011. The composite of 97 on-the-ground LIDAR scans were made less than a week before the start of dismantling the Elwha and Glines Canyon Dams upstream. The 34,131,100 georeferenced points of light will serve as […]
Drawing Wind
These maps, still screen saves from Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg’s animated windmap, show U.S. wind patterns and their velocity at approximately 2pm eastern standard time today. The stream of near real-time maps are constructed with data from NOAA’s National Digital Forecast Database. Similar to drawing water, agencies of algorithms have been deployed, collating and […]
Panopticity
[the interior of IBM's Operation Center in Rio De Janeiro. "The new Operations Center in Rio provides the incident commander and responders with a single, unified view of all the information that they require for situational awareness." Images and caption courtesy of IBM.] A recent New York Times’ article, “Mission Control Built For Cities“, provides […]
‘Drawing Water’
[Maps from David Hicks Drawing Water Series. Winter, 2011 (top) and Midwest, 2011 (bottom)] David Wicks MA thesis project, Drawing Water, links USGS national water consumption data with rainfall data compiled by NOAA/NWS in a series of maps. The data are parsed with Python scripts and the prints (above) were generated using software written on […]
Owning Space + POPS Urbanism
[DSGN AGNC's mappings of privately owned public space (POPS) in Manhattan: "What happens as more and more land in the city is owned by private entities? Will we all be welcome? To what extent will these spaces remain public? What avenues will the public have through which to request changes?"] #whOWNSpace maps are featured in […]
Levee Glyphs
Blooms of cyanobacteria weave through remnant levees adrift in Klamath Lake’s eutrophic waters. Stripped of their engineered function, the string of islands continue to serve as an inscription of their own layering of compounded histories: ….(1) the shape of the pre-anthropogenic river delta the levees circumscribed: [Aerial photograph of the Williamson Delta in the 1940s, […]
