Sea Turtle Nesting Map

 

SWOT: Worldwide Green Turtle Nesting Sites 2011 (thumbnail)

Earlier this month, GIS and Science reported that a map of green turtle nesting sites by Andrew DiMatteo, cartographer for the State of the World’s Sea Turtles (SWOT) Project, won this year’s International Conservation Mapping Competition. The map was published in Volume VI of the SWOT Report and is available separately here (PDF). The SWOT project has published a number of maps showing sea turtle nesting sites and biogeography; there’s also an interactive map. If you know me at all, you know how big a fan I am of reptiles in general, so I’m happy to see so much mapping activity dedicated to their conservation.

The Square and Stationary Earth map

 

Map of the Square and Stationary Earth by Prof. Orlando Ferguson (1893)

 

With his 1893 Map of the Square and Stationary Earth, Orlando Ferguson made visual his emphatic claim that the earth was flat. One hundred and eighteen years later, one of the last remaining copies is being donated to the Library of Congress, which inexplicably does not already own a copy of this dotty gem. Only one other copy is known to exist. More (including a high-resolution scan) at The History Blog.

Disease Maps

Book cover: Disease Maps

 

Paul Di Filippo reviews Tom Koch’s Disease Maps in the Barnes and Noble Review. “What cannot be overlooked about this book is something incidental but overwhelming: the visual beauty of these maps. Colored and drawn by hand in most cases, with exquisite calligraphy, they offer aesthetic joys divorced from their mortal reality. Seldom has mass death looked so graphically alluring.”