From the category archives:
According to a paper from the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the introduction of low-cost barbed wire fencing to the American Plains led to more efficient land use, rising settlement rates, increased land values, and greater crop productivity. Before the land was fenced, farmers risked uncompensated damages from others’ livestock, and this risk and high cost [...]
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The Australian government is taking a landscape-scale approach to conservation and biodiversity preservation with a new National Wildlife Corrridors Plan that invests $10 million over the next three years. The approach will ensure effective migration of species with a coordinated approach across all governments, private land owners and regional community groups. An ongoing Biodiversity Fund [...]
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The Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) led the project to map the British landscape vegetation and land cover at an unprecedented scale. The latest UK Land Cover Map (LCM) shows the distribution of different habitats throughout the country at a 25-metre resolution. The impetus for the project is the decline in insect pollinators, with [...]
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The Chronicle of Higher Education has a thought-provoking piece by Rob Nixon about the need, and the difficulty, of visualizing and communicating the impacts of slowly evolving crises. He outlines the challenge of conveying the impacts of climate change, deforestation, oil spills, ocean acidification and a host of other slowly evolving issues of global impact [...]
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The Marine Stewardship Council launched a sustainable seafood product finder today, with a global directory for the types of sustainable fish products that can be found in your local grocery store. The product finder includes 5,248 certified products in stores in 70 countries. The site is searchable on the retailer name, fish species and product [...]
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Two young men are setting off on an unassisted 750-kilometre hike through the Haida Gwaii in British Columbia in order to highlight the pristine nature of the wilderness, and to protest Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline project. Sam Harrison, a recent social geography graduate of the University of Northern B.C. and Nathan Leenders of Whitehorse [...]
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The Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife (DWFW) has just launched a free online mapping tool that displays information about key fish and wildlife species and critical wildlife habitat. The Priority Habitats and Species site unlocks much of the information needed by local, state and federal agencies for land-use permits that used to require [...]
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It took two volunteers two years to map 19,933 trees in New York’s Central Park. The pair, Ken Chaya a graphic designer and Edward Sibley Barnard an author, created a two-sided, waterproof, 36-by-26-inch map, called “Central Park Entire: The Definitive Illustrated Folding Map.” The map includes 174 tree species and is sold for $12.95 at [...]
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More than a million feral camels wander the arid inland of Australia, harming the fragile rangeland and waterholes. The Australian Feral Camel Management Project has taken a crowdsourcing approach to help get a handle on this invasive species problem. The group have set up an interactive mapping website called CamelScan and are asking travelers to [...]
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Jordan launches a $1 million dollar online mapping site yesterday at an unprecedented countrywide scale. The site called MEGA (Middle Eastern Geodatabase for Antiquities) details every archaeological site in the country and aims to help preserve its treasures. MEGA uses GIS to map 11,000 registered sites in the country, with details on the inventories at [...]
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