The Pledge Gap

The Climate Change Pledges Are In. Will They Fix Anything? is a nice data viz by the New York Times of CO2 emission reduction pledges in the context of the Paris Climate Change Conference. Scroll-down all the way for the take-home message: what future do you want?

Learn QGIS

Five free QGIS courses (self-taught at your own pace) - more information about the curriculum and content at the FOSS4G Geoacademy Curriculum.

Open-Source Interactive Web Mapping

And it all happens inside your browser = no software to download and to install. From Paper Maps to the Web: A DIY Digital Maps Primer is a great tutorial and you will be using all the cool tools, for example:

• Map Warper
• GeoJSON.io
• Leaflet
• Mapbox.js
• JSFIDDLE

Dubline

Cool and simple story map: Dubline

Population Viz

Here's India vs. China and Nigeria vs. the USA.

The Data Journalism Handbook

The Data Journalism Handbook is an open-source community-based effort. Pretty cool!

Web Scraper and Data Scraper

Two Chrome extensions / apps to 'scrape' data off websites: Web Scraper and Data Scraper.

World Population Growth

World Population Growth by Max Roser is intense: lot's of text, lot's of charts, lot's of maps, and lot's of data. Speaking of the data - all are available for download as CSV files.

Why People Don't Believe In Climate Science

Mapping History!

These visualization of history are just cool!

• Histography provides an interactive timeline of history (based on Wikipedia) for the last 13.8 Billion years.
• The Museum of the World is an interactive experience mapping time, continents, and cultures.

Tornado Tracks 1950 to 2014

Tornado Tracks 1950 to 2014 is a nice interactive web map (using Esri ArcGIS Online) showing tornado tracks between 1950 and 2014: clean, simple, and useful.

The Dreaded Non-Zero Y-Axis

Climate Change Mitigation Policies

Tree Canopy Assessment Tool

Could be useful: Tree Canopy Assessment Tool

Drought Mapping using CartoDB

This is a great tutorial: Make a Thematic Map of Current Drought Conditions (using CartoDB)

D3.js and R

Better Data Visualization with Python, D3.js, MapReduce and R has some nice information and links related to those four data analysis and visualization tools, for example:

• D3 Tutorials (by Scott Murray)
• 20 D3 Video Tutorials (by d3Vienno)
• Introduction to Data Science with R - Part 1 (David Langer)
• Introduction to Data Science with R - Part 2 (David Langer)
• Data Visualization Using R (23:45 minutes)
• Combing R and D3.js

The Breathing Earth

Non-Esri Story Maps

Esri Story Maps is pretty great, but how about some alternatives?

• Odyssey.js
• MapStory
• StoryMapJS (including SnapMap)
• StoryMap for Images
• ThingLink
• TimeMapper
• MapStory and Data Basin
• Mapme Stories

Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic

Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic is the person behind the awesome blog Storytelling with data, the new book storytelling with data.

Walmart!

ThingLink

ThingLink is fun and basically a simpler version of StoryMap JS: upload an image and make it interactive by adding tags and linking to multimedia. In other words: make a story map from an image - be that of some natural feature, art, or whatever.

Here's a fun example: GPS Survey of the Quelccaya Ice Cap

Now That's A Map!

Well-written: Equal Area Cartograms and Multivariate Labels with several great examples, including this one:

Geocaching, GPS, and More

New webinar by JoeKerski on Geocaching, GPS, and Related Geo-Activities - should be fun and useful!

Windyty Weather Forecast

These types of visualizations have been around, but Windyty now includes the wind, temperature, pressure, cloud, and humidity forecast for the next few days. Plus, you can change the altitude to see how the winds change as you go up in the atmosphere. And you can change between 2D and 3D modes, plus choose different base maps.

Deforestation in Brazil

NPR Look At This has a powerful photographic journal of rain forest deforestation in Brazil (which includes a few maps). This is a nice example of story mapping without really any maps.

ArcGIS 10 Tutorial

This is pretty great: a hyper-texted and illustrated tutorial for ArcGIS 10 by the folks from Amherst College.

SHOW by Mapping Worlds

SHOW by Mapping Worlds makes interactive cartograms of countries, US states, or Japan prefectures and you can get the data as MS Excel spreadsheets - nice!

TeachGIS.org

Teach GIS is a venue where expert and novice instructors of geographic information systems (GIS), and related geospatial technologies, could feel comfortable sharing ideas, asking and answering questions, and learning from one another. We are software neutral and very open-minded towards open source tools. We welcome any and all fellow GIS instructors from our wider global community to join the conversation.

The Lab Activities section hosts a nice searchable version of Esri's Spatial Labs.

Esri Spatial Labs

Esri Spatial Labs are standalone activities designed to promote spatial reasoning and analysis skills. In other words: they are boring. But, together with authentic place-based question they can serve as intellectual stimuli as well as opportunities to practice tools and techniques. Download the entire package as a 2.3 GB zipped ISO file.

MapWorks

MapWorks is fun and useful and allows you to style and annotate an OSM map and to download your map as a PNG or SVG file.

Ecological Land Units

Or: a new map of the global ecosystem - explore:

• Explore a Tapestry of World Ecosystems (Esri Story Map).
• Or, as an interactive and searchable web app as called Explore the Ecological Tapestry of the Word.
• Or, use as part of the Landscape Layers in ArcGIS.
• Or, download the original data from the USGS (2.4 GB zipped).

Africa Map

Africa Map is a comprehensive mash-up of many data layers from Africa (using Harvard's WorldMap web mapping tool).

The American Time Use Survey

I had no idea such a thing existed until I saw the The American Time Use Survey visualized at Counting the Hours on FlowingData. And there is even ATUS-X, a website by the University of Minnesota where you can easily download the data.

US Crime in 2013

Nicely-done in R Studio: US Crime in 2013

Evernote

I used to be an Evernote user and then switch to Trello for task management and Google Docs/Drive for everything else. Still, the speech-to-text feature in Evernote is appealing: in theory it transcribes your voice notes.

Esri Survey 123

Survey 123 for ArcGIS looks useful - a tool/app to facilitate field surveys and field data collection using tablets. There is more about it in the Survey123Community on GitHub and in ArcNews (Fall 2015).

Fun with GIS 191: Survey 123 helps you to get started and Charlie Fitzpatrick also created a nice sample activity with a sample spreadsheet.

SIGMA

The System for Integrated Geoscience MApping (SIGMA) by the British Geological Survey is a tool for field data collection, mapping, and visualization running on Windows and using ArcGIS 10 and MS Access 2007.

ASTER GEDv3

The ASTER GEDv3 offers TIR data from 2000 to 2008 at 3 arc sec (~100 m) resolution - cool!

NOAA Solar Calculator

Fun and useful: the NOAA Solar Calculator gives you sunrise, sunset, and solar noon.

Commons Lab

Commons Lab is (as they state on the website) a database of federal crowdsourcing and citizen science projects. Somehow I'm not impressed...am I missing something here?

Greenland Melting!

Greenland Is Melting Away is an incredible viz by the NYT, combining awesome drone footage and photographs with cool interactive annotated satellite images.

Sunny Cities

Sunshine on my Shoulders is a great data viz using Tableau, basically the book end to the great Why does it always rain on me?

Mapping the Uninsured

Another nice interactive map by the TheUpshot: We Mapped the Uninsured. You'll Notice a Pattern.

The Growth of the US

Seen on FlowingData: the territorial evolution of the US between 1629 and 2000 as a YouTube video. Even better: the data files are available for download!