Remastering Natural EarthTom Patterson, US National Park Service (retired), Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso, Snap Inc.
Natural Earth did not develop according to a grand plan. It started off with World Databank 2 coastlines, rivers, and lakes dating from the 1970s. And things then grew from there. To put Natural Earth on a firmer foundation, we are rebuilding it from modern data sources and using the latest generalization methods. The new 1: 10 million-scale data will have slightly more detail than the previous version and will be chock-full of attributes. The remastering effort will take a couple of years to complete. Although a possible new data source could speed up the work considerably.
What's in a Line? Mapping South American Rivers for Natural EarthAlex Fries
My biggest personal project over the past year has centered on developing an entirely new dataset of rivers in South America for Natural Earth. In this work, I have strived to embrace the delicate balance of creating a dataset that accurately reflects the courses and names of these waterways in a manner that also maintains the standard of small-scale cartographic beauty that defines Natural Earth. In this talk, I'll discuss some of the technical challenges that come with mapping rivers across an entire continent, as well as the more fundamental questions concerning our epistemic understanding of what a river is that must be carefully answered when creating a dataset that will be accessible to and used by cartographers throughout the world.
Recognizing multiple points-of-view in Natural EarthNathaniel Kelso
Natural Earth's goal is to increase geographic literacy by making it easy to compile and publish maps from high-quality, free, and open data. Natural Earth is used by people in every country around the globe and in version 4 we added name localizations for 21 popular locales via Wikidata. Since those 2017 and 2018 releases, the project's authors have heard feedback that Natural Earth's default de facto view doesn't work for every legal jurisdiction. Our north star in this work is our belief that school teachers are able to teach geography based on Natural Earth without teachers worrying about legal compliance issues. In version 5 released in 2021, Natural Earth introduces additional support for 31 alternate points-of-view and more!
That’s a Relief: Assessing Aesthetic Preference and Landform Clarity in Terrain MapsNathaniel Alexander Douglass, Carolyn Fish, University of Oregon
Terrain maps offer a three-dimensional representation of topography that gives an important depth cue to readers while also providing a unique aesthetic experience. This research proposes an examination of both traditional and modern relief shading techniques, with aims to empirically assess map reader perception. Specifically, I propose investigating the way three relief shading techniques (Manual relief, analytical relief, and Blender generated relief) influence landform clarity and overall aesthetic appeal, when blended with hypsometric tinting, landcover, and orthoimagery. Check out my talk where I discuss the results of an online user study using nine different terrain map variations for Crater Lake, OR!
This session is co-moderated by Patrick Kennelly (in-person) & Martha Bostwick (remote/Slack)
Slack channel:
#nacis2021-session-naturalearthterrain
