Quebec Flood Maps Will Get a New Framework Next Year

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
A side-by-side comparison of old and new flood zone maps from a Quebec government website.
Gouvernement du Québec

It seems as though the Quebec government has been in the process of updating its flood maps for the better part of the past decade (previously: Quebec’s Updated Flood Maps Prove Controversial; Quebec Flood Maps). But starting next March Quebec’s flood maps will adopt a new framework categorizing flood zones by risk (low, moderate, high, very high), with a special category for areas located near dams or flood protection structures. This page (in French) explains how the new maps—which aren’t yet available—will work. The upshot is that more homes in Quebec will find themselves in a flood zone (though fewer than was feared last year), but likely in the lowest-risk category.

AllTrails and AI-Generated Hiking Trails

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Last month the hiking app AllTrails announced AI-generated (“leveraged”) custom routes as part of a new premium membership plan, and some people are worried about it. According to the National Observer, AllTrails and other hiking apps have gotten hikers into trouble because they rely on crowdsourced trail information, which isn’t necessarily official or safe. Given generative AI’s track record for producing spectacularly erroneous results, there would appear to be some cause for concern. Except that “AI” has become a marketing buzzword that covers a lot of computer stuff, from less problematic machine learning (which is what I’d expect in this case) along with more problematic generative AI/large-language models, and AllTrails isn’t indicating which flavour they’re referring to (because: buzzword). And as the National Observer points out, “These problems already existed before the AI was added.” To be sure, generative AI is a blight on human civilization, but let’s be clear about our targets in this case.

Some Minor Updates to Apple and Google Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

In what seems like a relatively minor update, Apple Maps will learn your preferred routes and remember visited places as of iOS 26, coming this fall. Meanwhile, Google Maps has announced some sustainable travel updates: recommending alternatives to driving, cycling route details, fuel-efficient routing, and marking low-emissions zones in Europe.

The Ocean Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London has a new attraction. “The Ocean Map is a giant, 440m2 floor map that turns our view of the world inside out. While most world maps focus on countries and continents, the Ocean Map is all about water.” You can probably see where this is going: the Museum’s floor map uses the Spilhaus projection. Here’s a preview from before the hall in which it’s situated reopened on June 7:

I'm genuinely SO excited about the new ocean map that will be at the heart of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich when this hall reopens on June 7th. It's an unusual ocean-focussed map with so much detail, and it's just brilliant. 🌊🌊 Here's a sneak peak.www.rmg.co.uk/stories/ocea…

— Helen Czerski (@helenczerski.bsky.social) 2025-05-31T09:38:34.627Z

Exploring the History of Geospatial Software

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Ingrid Burrington is working on a PhD dissertation on the history of geospatial software and she’s posting through it. Two gems I’ve run across so far:

  • (How) do computer maps make money? “The first thing that seems important to state upfront, even though it seems obvious: the business of maps is almost entirely business-to-business, not business-to-consumer. Even if a digital map or geospatial product is consumer-facing, most of the money changing hands doesn’t happen at the level of the individual looking at a map.”
  • Notes on the history of the map tile. “Crediting the brothers Rasmussen and Google Maps with the map tile is sort of like crediting Steve Jobs and Apple for the smart phone: understandable but formally imprecise. Both are examples of a company taking technologies and user experiences that had been speculated on or experimented with and transforming them into the seemingly obvious, inevitable Way Things Are Done.”

When we talk about the history of cartography (and when I deploy the history of cartography tag) we usually think of something older than the goings-on in Silicon Valley a few decades ago: al-Idrisi and Mercator, not Dangermond or Tomlinson. But recent history is still history.

Wildfires in Canada

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

So we’ve had some wildfires on our plate here in Canada. CBC News has a page tracking wildfires in Canada, including maps of wildfire location, risk and smoke. Richard points out that FireSmoke Canada (previously) is a forecast map, not a map of actual conditions, for which see AQMap.ca, which tracks fine particulate (PM2.5) monitors across Canada.

AI Chatbots and Geolocation

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

AI chatbots don’t have the best track record when it comes to accuracy. They appear to struggle with geolocation too, as Bellingcat discovered two years ago in a test of OpenAI and Google chatbots. Bellingcat has now tested them again, this time putting 20 large-language models to work on 25 travel photos to see if things have improved, with Google Lens reverse image search as a control. The result? A few ChatGPT models outperformed Google Lens, but not by much; the rest were worse. Details at the link.

(Update: Bellingcat’s coverage goes in quite a different direction than reports last April highlighting ChatGPT’s “scary” ability to pinpoint locations from photographs, largely because it compares it with existing non-AI reverse image search. Privacy risks may not depend on the kind of technology analyzing the photo, in other words.)

Reimagining GIS

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Linda Stevens says it’s time to move past GIS:

Since its inception, the evolution of GIS has often felt like forcing a square peg into a round hole. Over the years, the layer-based model has been stretched and modified to accommodate everything from long transaction editing to the intricate modeling of interconnected ecosystems.. Yet, as computing power grows, cloud resources expand, and database technologies advance, the limitations of a map- and layer-centric GIS have become increasingly evident.

The time has come to reimagine GIS—shifting towards a truly geographic-centric information system, one that fully embraces modern technology. It might go by a different name, and some may see it as unspecial, but I believe it has the potential to revolutionize how we approach data modeling.

Update: Mastodon commenters are more than a bit skeptical.

Unauthorized Waffle House Index Disaster Maps Taken Down

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Waffle House Index is an informal metric used to assess the severity of a storm in the U.S. South, because Waffle House restaurants don’t close unless Things Are Very Bad. But when Jack LaFond scraped Waffle House’s website to build a map tracking restaurant closures last fall, he got a cease-and-desist from Waffle House over trademark issues. It got resolved more-or-less amiably in the end, but the website stayed down all the same. A different map, Riley Walz’s Waffle House Index map, which I covered last fall, also appears to be offline now, for what I presume are the same reasons.

NOAA Cuts Threaten Spatial Reference System Update

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Wired reports that Trump administration cuts to NOAA are threatening an already-delayed update to the National Spatial Reference System (NSRS), which was supposed to replace NAD 83 and NAVD 88 in 2022 with corrected spatial measurements more in line with satellite data. (See this 2020 post on the difference in elevation data.) “According to former staff, NGS was sitting at 174 employees at the start of the year, with staff looking to fill an additional 15 positions to help with rolling out the new datums and educating federal agencies and local governments on their use. Since January 20, the agency has lost nearly a quarter of its staff and has had to freeze planned hiring.” Wired situates this in the context of the U.S. falling further behind in geodesy research.

The Osher Map Library’s 2025 Illustrated Mapmaking Contest for Maine Elementary Students

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Osher Map Library’s illustrated mapmaking contest for elementary school students has been a thing since 2016. For the 2025 contest, some 350 entries from Maine fourth, fifth and sixth graders were received. They’ve been narrowed down to twelve finalists; the winners, who get prizes, will be determined by public vote—which ends tomorrow, so go have a look.

Exploring GPS Alternatives

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

In March the FCC issued a Notice of Inquiry to explore GPS alternatives, citing increasing threats to the resiliency of the existing GPS network. GPS World worries that the U.S. may limit domestic access to non-U.S. navigation systems (Beidou, Galileo, GLONASS), which many devices support, for security reasons.

Breathless coverage in TechCrunch for one such alternative, Tern AI, a startup that promises GPS-free navigation. From what I can gather, it relies on a combination of car sensors, onboard maps and dead reckoning, helped along with a liberal sprinkling of AI fairy dust, to arrive at a fix within a few minutes. Now, I’m reflexively skeptical of all things AI, so I’m not holding my breath; this sounds like a modern-day Etak Navigator with machine learning.

A joint project between Australia and India, involving RMIT University and space firm SkyKraft, is exploring setting up a regional navigation system based on low-earth orbit satellites.

GPS on the Moon: I’ve reported previously on the idea that Earth-orbiting GNSS satellites could be used for lunar navigation. The tech company GMV announced results of field testing for the LUPIN project, which aims to bring navigation to the moon based on lunar-orbiting satellites. Neither the press release nor the coverage (Engadget, Reuters) is particularly revealing, though.

My, that’s a lot of vague press releases.

Map of the Month Club Launches

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
A series of thumbnails showing various map products available from the Map of the Month Club. Nicked from Daniel Huffman’s page.
Daniel Huffman

On behalf of the Independent Map Artists (previously), Daniel Huffman is launching an experiment: a map of the month club.

For a one-time subscription fee of $200, folks can get new mappy goods sent to them each month for five months (so, $40 per month). People can explore items from multiple artists, and I hope it will help bring new attention to my colleagues—support that these individual mappers might not otherwise get if they were not part of a group. Picking out individual interesting maps can be hard, so we’re making it easy for people to receive an assortment.

That fee includes shipping. The product page lists some of what the subscription is likely to include. It’s a one-time deal, a single five-month package, for now, but may continue if it proves successful. Signups close on June 15.

A Hand-drawn Map of the British Isles

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Mark Esper

Mark Esper spent one and a half years drawing a map of Great Britain, Ireland and the dependencies (Isle of Man, Channel Islands). He describes how he did it in this blog post. “In its finished form, this map contains over 280 cities, as well as a countless number of castles, ruins, and other buildings scattered over the map.  All 21 National Parks are labeled, 12 different languages are present: English, Guernésiais, Jèrriais, French, Auregnais, Serquiais, Cornish, Manx, Irish Gaelic, Welsh, Scots, and Scottish Gaelic, and all major bodies of water are labeled.” He’s selling it as a 24×36-inch print. “In the future, I plan on continuing to draw countries, states, continents and other regions of the world in a similar level of detail.”

Adventures in Unpreparedness

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Two recent cautionary tales about the risks of going forth without proper navigational tools. First, I’m a bit confused about this BBC News report, which cites what3words as coming through when a boat broke down in the Channel Islands area:

[The rescue service] said although the vessel had no working on board GPS and an inoperative VHS radio, crews were able to establish a position using the location app “what3words”. […]

The coastguard said an operator was able to translate the vessel’s what3words location from a mobile phone into latitude and longitude.

Now hold on: if you’re able to use what3words on a mobile phone to get a fix on your location, it’s because your phone has a built-in GPS, so it’s not like they didn’t have access to GPS. More likely is that they couldn’t figure out how to get lat/long coordinates to rescue services in any other way. (It’s a long press on your location in either Apple Maps and Google Maps, but to be fair, that might not be obvious or easy to figure out for the first time in the middle of a crisis.)

Meanwhile, an unprepared hiker without a map who got lost in New Hampshire will likely be billed for the cost of his rescue.