120: Urban Growth in Southwest Salt Lake

Here's the latest Geog 120 Web Map. We looked at aerial photography from three dates, 10 years apart, to investigate the rapid growth of the Southwest Salt Lake Valley over the past 20 years. Wow! View the Full Size Map

Geog 120: Mapping the LDS Church in Latin America

Here's the next great interactive map my World Regional Geography students are working on. This one maps the distribution of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Latin America, where its strength is second only to the United States.

Full Size Map

Geog 120: Invent your own Development Index

For this assignment, my students are using statistics from the World Bank to invent their own index of human and/or economic development for Africa. Here is an example, based on GNI per Capita (PPP), Life Expectancy, and the Percent of GDP in the Service Sector. Look at this awesomeness!

Full-size map

Data Source:
World Bank, "2013 World Development Indicators," World DataBank, http://databank.worldbank.org/

120 Map 3: Asia Natural Hazards and Resiliency

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Asia has lots of natural disasters.

Here are a couple cities that are trying to do something about it:
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2

Sources:
Global Volcanism Program, 2013. Volcanoes of the World, v. 4.4.1. Venzke, E (ed.). Smithsonian Institution. Downloaded 15 Oct 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.5479/si.GVP.VOTW4-2013

United States Geological Survey, 2015. ANSS Comprehensive Earthquake Catalog. http://earthquake.usgs.gov/

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2015. International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship (IBTrACS), tropical cyclone data. http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/ibtracs/

Atlas map 1

I've had some requests for maps from the Atlas of LDS History for Sunday School lessons this year, and since I couldn't get the atlas out in print in time, I've decided to post a few sample maps that may go with the lessons. If you use them, please give credit where credit is due, and don't pass the files around (refer people here).

Revelations in the Doctrine and Covenants

Click on the image for full-size version

Map Funnies

I know The Onion can be a bit irreverent at times, but they're good at satirizing things, even map things:

This puts our election night part in perspective:
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/89154

This one I meant to show all semester in Cart class:
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/breaking_news_series_of
If you passed my 412 class, I guess that makes you a "concentric circle expert."

Geography 211:
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/report_6_out_of_10_americans

Okay, and a geography 120 one:
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/35976

Some LDS KML files

For years, in my spare time I have collected various data about LDS geography. I'm happy that as we prepare the Atlas of LDS History, I'll finally be able to put some of it to good use. In the mean time, people have requested some of it, which I'm happy to provide. Here are a couple, converted to KML files:

• Stakes (as of November 2008). The color represents the locational accuracy. Black is at the stake center, dark blue is within a couple miles, and lighter blues are decreasingly certain.
• Districts (as of November 2008). Since these are so transient, I haven't put as much effort into them, but it's a shot.
  

I welcome your comments and corrections. No, on second thought, don't send me corrections (unless they're really major); I don't have time to deal with them. Down the road, I have a research project for building a wiki-like website for group editing of GIS data. Then you can fix it yourself :-).

Below are the stakes in Google Maps. For some reason, it doesn't like the icons (exported from ArcGIS), and shifts everything up several pixels. Don't worry, it gets better (and more stakes appear) as you zoom in.

View Larger Map