ColorBrewer is a free online database of color palettes that are designed to be used with GIS. The website allows users to select from a variety of colors that have been pre-selected and formatted for both quantitative and qualitative data. In this post I will show you the steps for quickly bringing ColorBrewer color schemes into Cartographica. Cartographica can accept palettes directly from the ColorBrewer site for use in the Color Palettes Window. Although we specifically point at ColorBrewer for good palettes, Cartographica can import any combination of numbers where the Red,Green, and Blue components are separated by commas …

Arizona is currently experiencing a large wildfire on its Eastern border. The fire has been raging for several weeks and new satellite imagery produced by the U.S.Department of Agriculture Forest Service allows us to keep a daily watch on the fires. A great thing about the USDAFS data is that it is downloadable in Geotif format which allows for easy mapping and exploration. In order to get the data into Cartographica all you need to do is download the GeoTIFF and then import the data as a raster file. Below are several of the images. The images are …

The Housing Price Index is a quarterly report produced by the Federal Housing Finance Agency that describes the quarterly performance of home values. The index is an important measure of the economy especially because of the recent problems in the housing sector. For this post I created a state level data set showing the percent changes in the HPI across the United States since the last quarter of 2011 using data from the FHFA In the image below the states that are in red have experienced the most problems with decreasing home values. States with either light or dark blue …

Cartographica makes retrieving and displaying Web Map Service data very simple. Cartographica comes out of the box with several WMS links already incorporated into the program. However, the list of available WMS data available online is much broader than what is included as a link with the program. In this post I will show you how to find additional WMS data and then how to add and display the data using Cartographica. The methods for finding WMS data is as much an art as a science. The most effective method for finding WMS data is doing a Google search to …

On April 27th 2011 Tuscaloosa, Alabama was hit with an EF-4 tornado that had winds at nearly 200mph. According to the National Weather Service the tornado was at least a mile wide and stretched nearly 80 miles in length. Tornado warnings were in effect between 3:40 and 8:00pm. The number of fatalities within the city of Tuscaloosa was staggering as it was last reported as 41 the Tuscaloosa News In order to highlight the path of devastation of the tornado I obtained a satellite image from Public Intellegence The image shows the path of the tornado, which I …

The Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP) is an important issue for those who conduct spatial analysis using units of analysis at aggregations higher than incident level. The basic issue with the MAUP is that aggregate units of analysis are often arbitrarily produced by whom ever is in charge of creating the aggregate units. A classic example of this problem is known as Gerrymandering. Gerrymandering involves shaping and re-shaping voting districts based on the political affiliations of the resident citizenry. The problem was first described by Openshaw (1984) when he stated "the areal units (zonal objects) used in many geographical studies …

Avenza Releases MAPublisher 8.4 With Support for Cartographica Illustrator Files The new release of MAPublisher 8.4 (www.avenza.com) for Adobe Illustrator, allows data-rich Adobe Illustrator files which have been exported from Cartographica to be opened in Adobe Illustrator with all attributes, layers and geo-referencing intact. This means that there is now a direct path from the Cartographica GIS environment on Mac OS to the powerful Adobe Illustrator design environment without the loss of any attributes and geo-referencing. Now the full suite of MAPublisher cartographic tools can be used on Cartographica generated maps.

Indonesia is currently experiencing several natural disasters occurring simultaneously. The country recently experienced a 7.5 earthquake which resulted in a tsunami near the Mentawai Islands. Additionally, Mount Merapi, a large volcano on the island has erupted. Thus far, the two natural events have displaced nearly 20,000 people and have killed over 400. This post uses Cartographica to map the problems being faced by the troubled South Pacific country. The first image shows the Southeast Asia and the Epicenter of the Recent Earthquake The second image shows a closer extent of the Earthquake Epicenter The third image is of …

In a recent post on Boston.com the website highlighted areas of Florida that have been hit hard by the foreclosure crisis. In this post I use Cartographica to show many of the same areas described by the Boston.com article.The recent foreclosure crisis has left many neighborhoods in Florida, Nevada, and California undeveloped as many construction projects fell through with the collapse of the housing market. The Boston.com article points out several areas of Florida that have been hit hard by the recent halt in development. Using Cartographica's Bing Maps features this post shows how these same …

Cartographica has added new classifications for displaying data. We have expanded the classifications from Equal Interval and Jenks classifications to Equal Count, Equal Area, Quartile Distributions, Quintile Distributions, and classification that incorporates all Unique Values. The upgrades in classifications schemes gives users better capability for displaying data using choropleth maps. Data classifications are useful for representing continuous data in logically defined categories for use with choropleth mapping. The data classification methods for each have advantageous and disadvantages for representing data distributions. The different data classifications within Cartographica are described below with a basic discussion about what they do and how …

Recently two inmates escaped from a prison near Kingman, Arizona. The inmates, John McCluskey and Tracy Province have been on the run since July 30th. The two were helped by an accomplice named Casslyn Welch. It is believed that the three individuals are somewhere in Yellowstone National Park. However, it is also believed that Province is no longer with McCluskey and Welch. In this post we use GIS to map locations that have been mentioned in news reports regarding the escape. Also we conduct basic spatial analysis to illustrate how Cartographica can be utilized as a mapping tool for breaking …

The violent tension between Palestine and Israel is no secret to those who watch the news on a regular basis. The violence often escalates into rocket attacks from Gaza that are known to strike civilian targets inside of Israel. Check out the latest NPR report discussing the damage cause by this morning's more recent rocket attack. In this post we will map several rockets commonly used by Palestinian militants to determine how far each rocket can strike. This post uses a combination of several different data sets. The base maps used in this example were collected at Doc Savage's website …

I stumbled across an interesting article today about the expansion of GIS education into Middle and High Schools. The article in the Gainsville Times describes the process of training teachers and ways to discover new applications of GIS. Exposing kids to GIS seems to be the next step in the evolution of GIS as a commonly used technology. As of now it seems that GIS has remained useful only to professionals who gained training while in college. The early exposure will get more kids, and hopefully parents, interested in discovering the world through science and technology. As technology continues to …

The rising cost of energy has left many countries around the world in search of alternative sources of energy that are more environmentally friendly and cheaper than carbon based fuels. The expansion of renewable energy sources has many applications to GIS. Mapping can be used to determine the best places to install energy sources such as wind and solar, and can also be used to monitor where these types of power plants are located. In an attempt to find data highlighting the location of wind farms in the U.S. I stumbled across Wind Energy Database, which has a lot …

Apple has posted a number of great tutorials for users who are converting from PC to Mac. The tutorials give basic tips about how to use the Mac and provide references to the ways that functions done on a Mac are done on a PC. The tutorials talk about everything from controlling the dock to the ways that specific programs work. The mac tutorials are important because many of Cartographica's users have switched from the PC to the Mac, and these lessons might make life a little easier. Click on the link to the Mac Tutorials to take a look …

The field of public health is one that has benefited greatly from technology related to GIS. A very famous early example of use of maps to combat a public health problem is when John Snow mapped the outbreak of Cholera in England during the 1850's. The ideas used by John Snow have been greatly enhanced in the nearly two hundred years since his innovative use of maps. In this post data Public Health data on Cancer in the United States is mapped using Cartographica. The public health data used in this post were collected from National Atlas, which has numerous …

We are now nearly a month into this years hurricane season, which ranges from the first of June until the end of November. Hurricanes are extremely large, wide-spread storms that are naturally difficult to study. GIS has been used for a long time to track, monitor, and measure the effects of hurricanes. Recently I found a data set on the National Atlas website that has data for historic hurricanes from 1851-2004. The first screenshot shows the entire data set added to a map. Notice that there are over 30000 segments in the file. Joined to each segment are a number …

The FBI's Uniform Crime Report provides statistics on the number of crime that are committed in American cities and counties. These data are archived at the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). The crimes known as Part 1crimes are typically composed of Murder, Rape , Robbery, Aggravated Assault, Assault, Burglary, Larceny, Auto Theft, Theft, and Arson. This post uses data collected from The National Atlas that includes information for a series of years 1994-2000. The following maps show a series of five years to highlight which parts of the country have the most troubles with Homicide. The first map …

Agriculture is one industry that has great interest in using Geospatial analysis for improving production and conserving and protecting land quality. Monitoring such things as water usage, growth, crop production, and many other related features of farming can greatly impact what is grown, how it is grown, and the ways in which agricultural products are processed. In this post, data on U.S. agriculture production were collected from The National Atlas Website, which has several data sets that are useful for analyzing various factors related to natural resources and land management. The downloaded data has variables associated with the spatial …

The BP oil spill continues to plague the Gulf of Mexico. President Obama addressed the nation yesterday explaining the many challenges that oil spill presents, and the cost that it is having on the U.S. This post highlights the use of NASA satellite imagery of the oil spill and shows how to perform some basic analysis on how large the oil spill is. Specifically, you will see how to add and create your own layers for analysis. In order to map the oil spill a satellite image was first collected from NASA's Website. This post uses Cartographica's edit feature …