One way to celebrate World Water Day is to learn more about water and sanitation and how water quality and quantity vary by nation. The United Nations has a powerful tool called UN Water that provides an interactive map with snapshots of each country with a ranking of various water quality and water treatment issues.
In the United States, we are fortunate that a large majority of the US population has a safe, sanitary source for drinking water and that wastewater is safely treated. This is not the case everywhere.
Another way to celebrate World Water Day is to share the information that you learn with other people. Sharing knowledge is an important way to help spread awareness of the need for access to clean water. You can also share this information through social media.
Key messages for World Water Day 2025
Glaciers are melting faster than ever. As the planet gets hotter due to climate change, our frozen world is shrinking, making the water cycle more unpredictable and extreme.
Glacial retreat threatens devastation. For billions of people, meltwater flows are changing, causing floods, droughts, landslides and sea level rise, and damaging ecosystems.
Glacier preservation is a survival strategy. We must work together to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and manage meltwater more sustainably for people and the planet.
A Quick Look into Two Worlds: Video Games and GIS By Wael Alhaj
Imagine you’re playing your favorite video game, exploring new territories, or maybe you’re looking at a map, trying to find a place you’ve never been. Sounds pretty different, right? Actually, not as much as you might think! Video games and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), another term for map-making and analyzing, share more in common than you’d guess. Video games are all about fun and adventures, while GIS sounds like serious business with maps and data. But if we look more in depth, they are close related in the world of technology.
Both video games and GIS are big on creating spaces, whether it’s a fantasy land in a game or a detailed map of your city. In video games, you might roam around imaginary places or ones that look similar to the real life. GIS, on the other hand, is more about mapping out the real world, but sometimes it uses simple and easy to understand pictures instead of super detailed ones. Both are all about giving you a sense of space one for fun, the other for facts and figures.
Making Things Look Real
As game players we ask, how do some games look almost like real life? This is called “visual realism” and it’s pretty impressive in today’s games. GIS does something similar, but instead of creating life-like world and landscapes, it shows real-life information in a way that makes sense by converting the data into a colorful map. Games go for the impressive appeal and eye-catching goal with graphics, while GIS tries to make complex info easy to get.
Handling Loads of Data
Video games and GIS deal with a lot of details. Games keep track of everything in their world such as places, objects, characters. As Same as in GIS, which combines location and spatial info with all sorts of other data. They both handle a ton of different kind of information, showing us how to manage and use big sort of data in different ways.
Scripts and User-Friendly Features
Both video games and GIS use some smart tricks behind the scenes. They’ve got algorithms for figuring out space related stuff, like how to find the best path from “A” to “B”. Games focus more on making everything interactive and fun, with everything happening in real-time. GIS concept is more about analyzing space and showing data in a fixed way. But deep down, the theories, codes and scripts they use is pretty similar.
Challenges and Possibilities
Video games and GIS can learn a lot from each other. Games are always pushing the limits of making things look real and keeping players engaged and hooked, which could be great for GIS to make maps more interesting and interactive. On the flip side, GIS focus on getting every detail right and accurate could help games, especially when a developer wants a game to mimic the real world.
So, the intersection where video games and GIS meet shows us how two areas we thought were worlds apart can actually help each other out. As tech keeps evolving, we’ll probably see more of this mix and match, leading to even great results in both gaming and the map-making industry. It’s all about being creative with space, whether it’s for fun, learning, or visualize facts and information.
References
For all the reasons mentioned above, GIS industry, including companies like ESRI, is actively working on developing various plugins and tools for game engines such as Unity and Unreal Engine. These tools are designed to help game developers and designers to create realistic world maps and 3D content using GIS data. For further reference, you can explore these links: ArcGIS for Unity (https://developers.arcgis.com/unity/) and ArcGIS for Unreal Engine (https://developers.arcgis.com/unreal-engine/). Additionally, the paper “Videogames: the new GIS?” by Ifan D H Shepherd & Iestyn Bleasdale-Shepherd (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228577009_Videogames_the_new_GIS), offers valuable insights and is a great resource while exploring this topic.
This week as you gather with family and friends for a nice holiday meal take a minute to think the people who grew or produced your food and about all the places different staples come from. Below are two maps, “Where does Thanksgiving Dinner Grow?” created by Linda Zellmer and “Mapping the Thanksgiving Harvest” by David Asbury. Click on the map images below to explore the maps.
Linda Zellmer, a Government Information & Data Services Librarian at Western Illinois University has a series of maps showing the states with the high production of Thanksgiving staples using 2017 data. Linda created maps for the staples data over the course of a 20 year period (1997-2017). For her GIS data, maps, and a Thanksgiving meal poster visit: http://faculty.wiu.edu/LR-Zellmer/thanksgiving.html
David Asbury, a member of the Esri StoryMaps Team, created this map series which shows production of staples at the county level using 2012 USDA Census of Agriculture data.
February was Black History Month and March is Iowa History Month (as well as Women’s History Month).
Points of Interest – Finding Dubuque ArcGIS Story Map
Image from Story Map
We are highlighting a map that celebrates Black Iowans in Dubuque, Iowa. Last fall, the City of Dubuque produced an ArcGIS Story Map called Finding Dubuque: Uncovering Dubuque’s Black Heritage. This Story Map shares stories of some of Dubuque’s early black residents and their contributions to the community as well as those of today. The Story Map also includes challenging parts of Dubuque’s past including redlining of insurance maps, real estate covenants restricting the tenure of black residents to certain land parcels and stories of the Ku Klux Klan in Dubuque.
Take time to learn more about the history of Black Iowans in Dubuque.
Teacher making a Landsat CollageTeachers making Landsat CollagesA finished Landsat CollageTeacher with finished Landsat CollageChoosing MaterialsParticipants with Landsat CollagesIowaView Staff Presentation
The Iowa Orthoserver (also known as the Iowa Geographic Map Server) has a variety of resources available to enhance and serve users. Today we are highlighting the Aerial Photo Dates layer. This layer allows users to determine the date of a particular image.
Open the Iowa Geographic Map Server ArcGIS Web App.
Select the first icon – Choose Map Layers (looks like 3 stacked sheets of paper.)
Scroll down to the Iowa – Aerial Photo Dates layer and then check the box to turn it on.
Expand the menu by clicking the tiny gray arrow to the left of the check box.
Now turn on whichever year of flight date you wish to use (the orange areas symbolize the flight paths and within them will appear the flight dates.)
*Please note* for some of the older imagery years (example 1930s, 1950s, etc.), you need to be zoomed in for the flight dates to appear. Zoom into an area of interest, the flight patterns and dates will be shown.
The statewide 2021 NAIP flight date layer is not yet available. This will be released when the layer is available. If you would like information regarding specific areas for the 2021 flight, please contact Amy Logan.
This week marks 40 years since the Mount St. Helens eruption. The image above is from the USGS Earthshots trading card series. The images are displayed in color infrared which is useful for showing living vegetation in red. The mountains surrounding Mount St. Helens are primarily forest. Notice the extreme change in the landscape from the 1973 image to the post eruption image in 1983. The damage was extensive and ash covered much of the surrounding forest land.
Today we celebrate 30 years since the Hubble Space Telescope began it’s orbit above Earth. In these thirty years, NASA has been able to discover and photograph so many new areas of our universe.
The Hubble Space Telescope was the first major optical telescope to be placed in space. This placement in space allows the telescope to get beyond the distortion of our atmosphere with it clouds and light pollution to make unobstructed observation of the universe. The Hubble telescope has allowed scientists to view the planets of our solar system as well as other galaxies.
The USGS has produced an amazing collection of images (also available as trading cards!) that show Earth’s change over time. The Earthshot collection has a wide variety of examples of change over time including: – natural phenomena changes (glaciers, deserts,) – social change (city growth,) – human interaction with the natural world (mining, deforestation, agriculture,) – natural disasters (hurricanes, tornado damage, flooding.)
Below are two examples of the trading cards, Mount St. Helens pre/post volcanic explosion and Las Vegas, Nevada population growth over time.
The cards provide side by side comparison images and also context about the images on the opposite side including information about the date of the images, satellites, bands used to create the images and location data.
If you view a location on through the browser you will get about 5 images you can review as well as context about the images.
A couple weeks ago Bloomberg News posted an interesting article (click here to read the article) showing how the stay at home orders are effecting areas around the world using high resolution satellite imagery. Below is an example showing Venice, Italy on October 20, 2019 compared to March 18, 2020 after the residents were asked to stay at home. It is interesting to compare the water clarity and traffic.
Venice, Italy: Notice the change in water traffic and water clarity after the Italy began ordering residents to stay at home. Source: Bloomberg.com
The article highlights numerous sites around the globe including: Wuhan, China (before shutdown / after shutdown); Mecca in Saudia Arabia; Venice, Italy; Epcot Center in Florida, USA; Tianjin, China; and Miami Beach, Florida, USA.
