Two Map Reviews
Conservation Outcomes: Mountains of Central Asia
This map, from the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF), a privately and publicly-funded initiative, shows biodiversity corridors in Central Asia and key hotspots within these corridors. It is extremely detailed, showing bodies of water, cities, mountain ranges, national boundaries, and roads in addition to biodiversity corridors and hotspots. The map is jumbled from a zoomed-out view and the biodiversity corridor symbology is hard to distinguish from the CEPF investment area symbology, but the green symbology for the hotspots makes them stand out and the map is much clearer when zoomed-in. An elevation map and a map of the highly-populated Ferghana valley and its surroundings are attached and informative. I like how national borders are shown as important, but not the main focus: the region’s 1,500 endemic plant species and 53 endemic vertebrate species do not care about borders, but cooperation between nations is important for conservation. Overall, the map is informative, but it could be clearer zoomed-out if it was split into multiple layers, symbology for features besides the biodiversity hotspots could be made more appealing and distinguishable, and corridors could be featured more than hotspots because many species need more space than fortress conservation in small preserves provides.
link to a more detailed map you can zoom in on: https://www.cepf.net/sites/default/files/map-mountains-central-asia-conservation-outcomes-english.pdf - go to here if you want to zoom in.
Rising Waters
These two maps, from the City of Boston, ESRI, and others, show projected effects of sea level rise on Boston. The leftward map shows Boston at current sea level, while the rightward map shows Boston, if no adaptive measures are taken, at high tide with a projected 91 centimeter higher sea level. Much of Boston, including The South End, Charlestown, East Boston, Back Bay, and downtown, was built from landfill around the Shawmut Peninsula: therefore, it is the fifth most vulnerable city to coastal flooding caused by sea level rise in the USA. The maps clearly symbolize the land-water division, and the dark blue symbology for the areas affected by sea level rise rightly stands out. Labeling famed Boston attractions (Faneuil Hall, the Aquarium, and the Seaport) within the areas affected by sea level rise effectively shows non-Bostonian viewers that not taking action has heavy costs. Overall, the map is informative, but the inclusion of features within Logan Airport coinciding with the exclusion or faintly symbolized inclusion of features in other parts of Boston makes the map inconsistent: this inconsistency is puzzling because the Airport is projected to be less affected by sea level rise than other parts of the city.
link to more info about Boston and sea level rise: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/boston-adapting-rising-sea-level-coastal-flooding
