GIS Day Map Contest Winners - 2022

2022 ASPRS SAC Map Contest

Java Trench Full Repture Model At Risk Population & Possible Inundation

Bryce Berrett

This map shows tsunami inundation and the population at risk from an impending megathrust earthquake that will eventually occur along the Java trench fault in Indonesia. Over 6,000,000 people in this region are at risk along coast. This map was created using dozens of individual tsunami models that were combined to give a comprehensive map of the region. While it is improbable that the whole fault will rupture together, or fail with such high displacement, this map is meant to represent a worse-case scenario for any location along the coast.

An updated interactive map of the region with improved data can be viewed with the following link: https://byu.maps.arcgis.com/apps/StoryMapBasic/index.html?appid=72ee5989bbeb434ab438d1a55ccd539a&extent=105.6089,-10.9315,120.2207,-5.7483


How Do You Design a Map for People Who May Not Need, Want, or Use One?

Peter L. Samson, Portland State University, Portland OR

To address the problem of homelessness in Portland (OR), the city launched an initiative in 2021 to create six “Safe Rest Villages” (SRVs) around Portland. The first one opened in June, 2022, in the southwest Portland neighborhood of Multnomah. It’s a cluster of about 30 tiny houses featuring a group kitchenette, showers, and laundry; mail and trash service; 24/7 supervision; and wrap-around social services.

Despite fierce opposition by several neighbors, many more expressed support for the SRV. A group of such supporters, organized as the Friends of the Multnomah Safe Rest Village, asked me to create for the SRV residents a reference map to familiarize them with this neighborhood that had suddenly become their new home, though not by their choice. This would not be a typical rah-rah-business-booster or family-parks-&-playgrounds map, and it posed some interesting challenges for the map maker:

  • With little to no disposable income, Villagers do not need to know the locations of tony boutique businesses, but they should know where the nearby core business district of Multnomah Village lies. What features are most important and useful?
  • How do you avoid depicting features that might project assumptions about upbringing, history, or current circumstances onto traumatized Villagers who are largely victims of systemic injustice or bureaucratic failure?
  •  Schools are understandably wary of what they perceive as unsavory individuals near their students, but schools are useful reference points. Do I include/label/name individual schools?  
  • How does one even title such a map?

Now, after many months of operation, the SRV is working fairly well: several Villagers have gotten jobs and some have moved from the SRV into housing. There have been no major dramas impacting nearby housed neighbors. Yet, sadly, the Villagers are every bit as fearful of their housed neighbors as nearby housed neighbors are of them. So far, the Villagers venture into the neighborhood mainly to grab a bus headed to more familiar places downtown. Do they even want or need a map of the Multnomah neighborhood?        

The Friends of the Multnomah SRV hope a welcoming local map could make Multnomah feel more like home to its newest residents. In such a fraught and complex political environment, the making of what might otherwise be a straightforward map becomes a challenging and thought-provoking exercise in social justice.


Bathymetric map of Lighthouse Creek

Chukwuma John Okolie PhD Student, Geospatial Surveying & Mapping, School of Engineering, Newcastle University, UK

This is a bathymetric map of Lighthouse Creek produced from Landsat imagery. The map shows the variation in depths of the water. It has numerous applications including coastal and marine planning, and environmental management. Lighthouse Creek is in the vicinity of Lagos harbour, Nigeria. The creek is relatively shallow with depths ranging from about 0.1 – 6m.

The traditional method of measuring bathymetry involves the use of acoustic devices such as the echo sounder. However, advancements in satellite remote sensing have created opportunities for measuring bathymetry from optical imagery. The bathymetric model by Stumpf et al. (2003)[1] was adopted for the estimation of the bathymetry shown on this map.

 


Liquor and Robberies in Washington DC

Conor MacBain Church

This map, entitled Liquor and Robberies in Washington DC, was created in an effort to clearly and simultaneously display several variables: quantity and location of hard-liquor establishments; quantity and location of reported robberies; and the proportions of those robberies as broken down by weapon used. The data of liquor-serving establishments (which includes liquor stores, bars, and clubs, but does not include food-focused businesses like restaurants, taverns, or brewpubs) were mapped by Police Service Area (PSA, also known as a police ‘beat’) and normalized by PSA area to account for density. The robbery values, on the other hand, were not normalized in order to focus on raw quantities and make fair comparisons. The robberies in each PSA were then plotted by scaled pie chart, showing the proportions of robberies involving a “gun,” “knife,” or “none/other.”

Surprisingly, while the map shows a perhaps expected trend of increased robberies towards the most alcohol-dense nightlife areas, comparing the high-robbery PSAs downtown with the high-robbery PSAs in Southeastern Anacostia also demonstrates that the percentage of unarmed robberies is significantly higher downtown.