Robin Hawkes

Senior Principal Engineer at Wood Mackenzie. Creator of ViziCities. Previously Senior Engineer at UrbanSim, worldwide devrel at Mozilla. Obsessed with maps and data.

Wales, UK

262 posts

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The painted panoramas that will make you yearn for Yosemite and dream of Denali

This article by Atlas Obscura takes a look at Heinrich Berann’s stunning painted maps of America’s national parks. Throughout the article Tom Patterson details some of the process behind both the creation of these maps and how Heinrich came to work for

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Google Earth Studio

You may have already heard of Google Earth Studio — a Web-based animation tool for Google Earth’s satellite and 3D imagery. It’s certainly not new but it’s still well worth a feature. I’m seeing it used more and more, especially for

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mapdeck: R interface to Deck.gl and Mapbox

If you use R then you’ll be interested in mapdeck, a library for visualising spatial data in R using Mapbox GL JS and Deck.gl. There are a large number of visualisation options and layer outputs to choose from. SymbolixAU/mapdeckR interface to

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RivWidthCloud

RivWidthCloud is a useful tool for Google Earth Engine to calculate river widths. It can calculate the widths over time from a series of Landsat images and can be run as either JavaScript or Python. Introducing RivWidthCloud, a Google Earth Engine tool for calculating

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Foggy Spaces

Ever found it hard to place where you live on a map? I know I have. This concept by Dylan Moriarty is a beautiful way of thinking about maps and how they compare to our mental representation of the places that we’re familiar

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Britain’s most complex motorway junctions

Lucie Woellenstein has created a visualisation of the most complex motorway junctions in Britain, beautiful in it’s simplicity. The complexity was defined by creating a buffer around each junction and working out the number of road nodes, road intersections, and the number of

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The Geology of Mars

Spatial Awareness, also known as the Eleanor Lutz Fan Club! This time I’m featuring her fascinating map on the geology of Mars. Based on an original map by the USGS, Eleanor has given it her own twist and also translated the key into

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John Snow's cholera map in 3D

John Snow’s cholera map needs no introduction. This 2019 version by Janett Baresel, Cheryl Lau and Raluca Nicola takes his map into the third dimension. It’s not just for the sake of it though, the 3D aspect allows for the “stacks of

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EthicalGEO

EthicalGEO is an initiative aimed to engage people within the spatial industry and get them thinking about the ethical challenges posed by spatial technology and the way that it’s being used to shape society. Homepage | EthicalGEOThe American Geographical Society (AGS) EthicalGEO Initiative seeks

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Paul Naylor

I featured one of Paul’s maps in a previous issue — the Ordnance Survey map of the Apollo 11 moon landing. A lovely piece of work that even Buzz Aldrin was seen enjoying this past week! He’s also active on Twitter, sharing work

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The Antarctic Iceberg Tracking Database

Obscure datasets are usually the most interesting, just like this dataset that tracks the positions of icebergs since 1992. No doubt there are all sorts of interesting visualisations and insight that can be produced from this data. The Antarctic Iceberg Tracking Database

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You thought OpenStreetMap data uses the WGS84 datum? No it doesn't!

This insightful post by StephaneP attempts to shine some light on the complex world of coordinate accuracy. In short — due to the movement of tectonic plates — WGS84 coordinates can’t be accurate unless you know the time that the coordinates were captured. He also

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How to draw an airport

I’m obsessed with aviation maps so I was excited to see this Observable notebook by Brett Camper on how to draw an airport. He achieves this by using Tilezen vector tiles for the data and D3 for outputting the maps. How to Draw

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Explore the history of the BART map

In this podcast Bart Wright delves into the history of the BART transit map (his name being Bart is a coincidence) and his involvement in designing the map over the past two decades. Podcast: Explore the history of the BART map | bart.govThere are

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Introducing Mapbox developer forums on Stack Overflow

If you’re anything like me then you probably spend a lot of time on Stack Overflow while hunting down answers to your burning programming questions. Mapbox have taken this on board and are now using Stack Overflow as an official support channel. Introducing

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The new ArcGIS StoryMaps has arrived

I’ve featured a selection of story maps in previous issues — they’re a great way to use maps and spatial visualisation alongside text to help communicate a story. Think of them as fancy blog posts. What I haven’t featured yet is that

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GeoJSON Path Finder — offline routing in the browser

Routing in Web maps can be both complicated and time-consuming, or expensive if you need to set up your own server or make a lot of API requests. One alternative option is to use GeoJSON Path Finder, which performs simple routing calculations within the

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Geospatial podcasts you should be listening to

If you want to treat your ears to something nice then look no further than this roundup of spatial podcasts. I’ve already featured a couple of them in this newsletter, and the rest look great too. We’re spoilt for choice! Geospatial podcasts

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Did you know that every Sentinel 2 image is actually a short video?

If you’re familiar with Earth observation then you may already know that Sentinel 2 imagery consists of data from various spectral bands. What I hadn’t realised myself is that the data for each of those bands is collected at slightly different times,

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Building Footprint Comparison

Back in 2018 Bing released a dataset containing 125 million building footprints across the US, generated using machine learning. This interactive map by Azavea highlights just how many of those footprints aren’t currently contained within OpenStreetMap. Building Footprint Comparison | Azavea Demo AppAzavea Demo

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Mont Blanc massif

More Blender-based shading this issue with this beautiful map of the Mont Blanc massif by Santi Hernández Puig. Not sure it’s ever possible to get bored of these maps. Lovely stuff. New map of the #MontBlanc massif designed from scratch. Classic style but

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How Planet's satellites map the Earth in a single day

Ever wondered how satellite imagery is captured on a daily basis? This visualisation by Nadieh Bremer shows how Planet map the Earth in a single day using 600,000 images captured from their fleet of satellites. Outstanding work! 👌 I’d also recommend reading the

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Topi Tjukanov

Topi Tjukanov is a prolific map-maker and someone who is incredibly active in the spatial scene. His maps and spatial visualisations are varied and often utilise cutting-edge techniques and technology. Definitely one to follow. Topi Tjukanov (@tjukanov)