Aqueduct Water Resource Atlas

 Image: Aqueduct, World Resources Institute

Threats to our global water resources can now be visualized with this impressive online tool: The Aqueduct Water Resource Atlas.  After three years of development, the map was recently launched through the nonprofit organization Water Resources Institute.   Users of the map will be able to access geo-tagged scientific data and that creates twelve different water risk indicators to create a visualization of where and how water risks exist.  Selected mapping variables include drought severity, flood occurrence, groundwater stress, and access to water.  This tool allows companies, governments, and environmental organizations  to visualize and compare water conditions across continents and make appropriate decisions about future investments, programs, and responses. 

Read Rachel Nuwer's NYT blog post "A One-Stop Shop for Water Worries" here

Video tutorial on "How to Use the Tool" here

Mapping Threats to the Great Lakes

The Great Lakes Environmental Assessment and Mapping Project (GLEAM) three year study  culminated recently in the release of a comprehensive map outlining the impact of environmental "stressors" on the world's largest freshwater system.  The environmental stress map was developed by academic researchers and environmental organizations, representing both the United States and Canada, drawing upon the latest and best data from federal and state agencies as well as non-governmental organizations and individual researchers.  UW-Madison's own Assistant Professor, Peter McIntyre is one of the project's leaders.  

The map complements the report published online for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS).  Ongoing Great Lakes restoration efforts are aided by offering this "merged high-resolution spatial analyses of environmental stressors with mapping of ecosystem services for all five Great Lakes"according to the PNAS report. Thirty-four individual stressors were considered, including coastal development, agricultural pollutants, over-fishing, climate change, invasive species and toxic chemicals.  Users are now able to scan the entire 900+ mile chain of lakes, zoom in, and see evidence of environmental impacts to the scale of one half a mile.  Truly an outstanding tool for promoting discussion and aiding actions taken to restore and protect our Great Lakes resources.

View the full map at the GLEAM website here
Access the full PNAS report "Joint analysis of stressors and ecosystem services to enhance restoration effectiveness" is available here
Read the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's article about GLEAM here 

The Big Two-Hearted River

Wisconsin Sea Grant's David Hart, along with his daughter, Madeleine, have just launched a new Google Lit Trip based on the classic short story by Ernest Hemingway, titled THE BIG TWO-HEARTED RIVER.

Google Lit Trips are simply a collection of "Placemarks" and online resources saved in Google Earth, related to a piece of literature. Once you've put a placemark at each location you can then begin embedding photos, videos, weblinks, and more in the "Properties" window of each location. There a Google Lit Trips for Kindergarteners through 5th grade, grades 6th through 8th and for high schoolers.

David and Maddie have created a lit trip based on Ernest Hemingway's short story "The Big Two-Hearted River" written in 1925. This story recounts a trout fishing trip near Seney in the eastern Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It speculates on the location of Hemingway's 1919 trip to the Seney area by comparing text in the short story to analysis by Prof. Jack Jobst and weaves details about a family camping/canoeing trip on the Fox River in August 2010 with information about the science of stream ecology, entomology, and water resource management.

To learn more about Google Lit Trips, visit their website.

To explore the Harts' lit trip, start here.

ICAN-Great Lakes - Madison, WI - September 13-15

An International Coastal Atlas Network meeting focusing on the Great Lakes will be held from September 13-15, 2010 at the Pyle Center on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus in Madison, Wisconsin. The meeting will bring together people who are interested in developing Coastal Web Atlases (CWAs) and linking them to analyze coastal issues at a broader scale.

The International Coastal Atlas Network serves a global reference for the development of CWAs. The Great Lakes meeting will be the fifth ICAN meeting since 2006. Previous meetings were held in Ireland, Oregon, Denmark, and Italy.

The ICAN-Great Lakes meeting will open on the afternoon of Monday, September 13th with an overview of ICAN and CWAs and will feature a showcase of mature coastal atlases with a focus on their impacts. The morning of the second day will explore use cases for interoperable coastal atlases, addressing topics such as marine spatial planning and climate adaptation. The afternoon will focus on building regional/thematic networks of coastal atlases and will explore how CWAs relate to initiative such as the Digital Coast and the Integrated Ocean Observing System. The afternoon session will also include a demonstration of integration of Great Lakes data from distributed sources to support decision-making. The technical session on the morning of Wednesday, September 15th provides training on implementing interoperable web map services and catalogs for CWAs led by Tom Kralidis of Environment Canada. There is a separate registration fee for this session and space is limited.

More information about the ICAN-Great Lakes meeting (including registration and lodging information) can be found at http://www.aqua.wisc.edu/ican/.

Feature: Wisconsin County & Municipal Web Mapping Sites

From David Hart, Wisconsin Sea Grant:

Link

Most county governments in Wisconsin (63 of 72 or 88%) have developed publicly accessible, interactive web mapping sites. An additional five counties have sites in development. This web site provides a means to access those that are available to the public and to track those sites in development. It does not attempt to inventory county government web sites that provide only tabular access to tax assessment records.

County web mapping sites can be accessed by clicking on the pink counties on the map below. Counties with web mapping sites in development are colored in yellow. Links to county web mapping sites, county web mapping services, and municipal web mapping sites are provided in the tables below the map and will open in a separate browser window.

Interactive web mapping sites in Wisconsin can also be discovered and accessed through other sources. The Wisconsin Land INformation Clearinghouse (WiscLINC) is maintained by the Wisconsin State Cartographer's Office. Click on the Catalog tab. Under the Search dialog, choose Select All under the Places Menu and choose Interactive Maps for the Resource Type. You can also search for web mapping services. Jerry Sullivan of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources maintains a comprehensive guide on Streaming Web Mapping Services to Your Desktop (November 2008). Several Wisconsin regional planning commissions keep track of county and municipal web mapping sites in their region, including the Southeastern Wisconsin RPC, the Bay-Lake RPC, the East Central Wisconsin RPC, and the North Central Wisconsin RPC.

Google Maps Rumsey Historical Maps

David Rumsey is one of the world's great map collectors, and he has been very generous by sharing his treasures via the David Rumsey Map Collection website. Recently, Rumsey has selected 120 historical maps from his collection to link up with data from Google Maps and Google Earth. These maps are tremendous repositories of historical and cultural information by themselves, and when they are joined up with the other maps, they present a multifaceted way of visualizing the past, present, and future of these locales.

As the website notes, this is "a marriage of historic cartographic masterpieces with innovative contemporary software tools." First-time visitors can read the explanation of how this is done, and then scroll down to look through the list of maps, which includes Chicago in 1857, Moscow in 1836, Kyoto in 1709, and a celestial globe from 1792. Also, visitors can toggle the satellite view via the Google Maps overlay map in order to compare and contrast the changes that have occurred over the past decades and centuries.

To view historical maps, go to David Rumsey Map Collection.

Great Lakes Maps

Take a look at Great Lakes online exhibits, brought to you by Wisconsin's Water Library and University of Wisconsin Sea Grant.

Making Maps, Mapping History
This exhibit traces the evolution of mapmaking since the 1600s and the historical influence of the Great Lakes on the history of Wisconsin. The original maps were collected for an exhibit at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Memorial Library Department of Special Collections, March 19 through June 29, 2007.

The maps are from the UW-Milwaukee American Geographical Society (AGS) Library and the UW-Madison Space Science and Engineering Center. The AGS Library is one of North America’s foremost geography and map collections. The Space Science and Engineering Center includes one of the first remote sensing facilities in the United States.

U.S. Lake Survey
In 1841, Congress created the Lake Survey within the U.S. Army Topographical Engineers, which later became part of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The Survey, based in Detroit, Mich., was charged with conducting a hydrographical survey of the Northern and Northwestern Lakes and preparing and publishing nautical charts and other navigation aids. The Lake Survey published its first charts in 1852. In 1882, after producing 76 charts, it had completed its Congressional mandate.

This pioneering effort eventually grew into a comprehensive program of scientific investigations and monitoring of the Great Lakes conducted through NOAA’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory (GLERL) in Ann Arbor, Mich.

Web resource: Great Lakes Observing System (GLOS)

The Great Lakes Observing System (GLOS) provides public access to critical, real-time and historical information about the Great Lakes, St. Lawrence River and interconnecting waterways for use in managing, safeguarding and understanding these immensely valuable freshwater resources. GLOS is intended to gather and integrate chemical, biologic and hydrologic data, and monitor lake conditions and trends over time.

A nonprofit GLOS Regional Association (GLOS-RA) governs and guides the system to ensure that stakeholder needs are met and that optimal information-gathering tools are in place and secure. GLOS is one of 11 regional associations within the U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS), a multidisciplinary network led by NOAA to provide data required by decision-makers to address common societal goals. GLOS currently addresses these four goals:

* Improve predictions of climate change and weather and their effects on coastal communities and the nation;
* Improve the safety and efficiency of maritime operations;
* Reduce public health risks; and
* Protect and restore coastal ecosystems more effectively.

Check out GLOS's website, Great Lakes Information Network's (GLIN) Site of the Month.

Web resource: freshwater ecosystems map

Freshwater Ecoregions of the World, (FEOW) provides a new global biogeographic regionalization of the Earth's freshwater biodiversity. Covering virtually all freshwater habitats on Earth, this first-ever ecoregion map, together with associated species data, is a useful tool for underpinning global and regional conservation planning efforts, particularly to identify outstanding and imperiled freshwater systems; for serving as a logical framework for large-scale conservation strategies; and for providing a global-scale knowledge base for increasing freshwater biogeographic literacy.

Presented by the Nature Conservancy, with several major corporate sponsors (including Coca Cola and US AID).

link: http://www.feow.org/index.php