Make Thematic Maps Quickly

Assume that for some reason you need to create some worldwide thematic maps. The maps should contain the national borders, main cities, main communication routes, rivers and lakes. Let us suppose you have a short time to finish the job and you have absolutely nothing at all in your archive. In other words, we have to solve this problem by using only information available on Geospatial Data Portals such as Natural Earth, NASA Earth Observations, The FAO GeoNetwork…, and so on. Over the years they have started to release free sources from global to regional, from agriculture to soils, administrative boundaries, population, marinas, and other themes.

Well, this premise justifies why to try Scribble Maps.

In this article, we focus on some data coming from the Natural Earth portal and we show how to manage and share Physical and Cultural Geography Information in an easy way through Scribble Maps.

The maps below are created in a short time with an excellent graphics rendering. We just had to load the data and choose the right basemap as per the data contents. Below is the list of maps with the associated basemap:

Cultural data:

• Airports => Map Base Road;
• Marinas => National Geographic Education.

Physical data:

• Elevation Points => Google Terrain;
• Glaciated Areas => ESRI Physical.

These maps can be a good starting point to share and discuss the main global geographic topics with students. For example, you may ask your students to collect videos and images related to the marker points around the world. Once they have finished collecting information for the 1st state it should be nice to share it to the rest of the class using Scribble Maps.  In this activity, each student can analyze the different basemap archives from Google maps and other providers (ESRI, Open Street Map, Map box, …). Once they have analyzed the Maps generated at the global level they could check which the best basemap is for the chosen area at the local level.

Let’s start, and share your maps with us!