“Wildflowers of Canada” is a limited-edition print released by Nova Scotia artist Sarah Duggan to celebrate Canada’s 150th birthday. Duggan also has a number of other examples of floral map art, in the shape of Canadian provinces (plus Cape Breton Island), on her Etsy store.
The Algonquian Linguistic Atlas, a collaborative, interactive web-based map that provides phrases in various indigenous languages in Canada, has earned its project director, Carleton University linguistics professor Marie-Odile Junker, a Governor General’s Innovation Award, CBC News reported in May.
At the CCA’s annual conference earlier this year, Natural Resources Canada launched its updated map of the North Circumpolar Region, which “shows the geography of the northern circumpolar region, north of approximately 55 degrees, at a scale of 1:9 000 000. The map uses the azimuthal equidistant projection. It includes all international boundaries, as well as the Canadian provincial and territorial boundaries and Canada’s 200 nautical mile offshore exclusive economic zone. National capital cities are shown, as are other cities, towns, villages and hamlets. Some seasonally populated places are also included. The map displays a number of significant northern features, including the median sea ice extent for September 1981 to 2010, the tree line, undersea relief, land relief, the Magnetic North Pole, glaciers, ice fields and coastal ice shelves. Many of the physiographic and hydrographic features are labelled.” [Cartophilia]
To deter looters, the locations of the wrecks of the Franklin expedition are a closely guarded secret. Except for one thing: a map showing the precise location of the wreck of the HMS Terror can be had via an access-to-information request. Two such requests have been made already.
CBC News reports that more than 3,000 indigenous communities in Canada—traditional First Nations reserves as well as treaty settlement lands and urban reserves—have finally been added to Google Maps. For some reason I thought they already were—U.S. Indian reservations have been on Google Maps for some time, after all (their visibility, or lack thereof, was commented on in 2011: here, here and here).
The Canadian Cartographic Association’s annual conference gets under way tomorrow at Carleton University in Ottawa. Here’s the conference program. It’s just an hour’s drive from where I live, and by all rights I should be attending, but I’ve been moving house all month and there’s no way I can spare the time. Best wishes to the conference organizers and attendees.
Joan Blaeu’s Archipelagus Orientalis is to Australia what Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 world map is to America: a case where a first appearance on a map is referred to as a country’s birth certificate. The 17th-century map included data from Tasman’s voyages and named New Holland (Australia) and New Zealand for the first time. The National Library of Australia is working on conserving its 1663 copy, but an earlier, unrestored version dating from around 1659 recently turned up in an Italian home; earlier this month it was auctioned at Sotheby’s and sold for nearly £250,000. [Tony Campbell]
Meanwhile, at a somewhat more modest scale, an 1884 hand-drawn map of what would later become the tony Vancouver neighbourhood of Kitsilano by colourful local Sam Greer went for C$24,200—five times its estimated price.
Iceberg Finder tracks icebergs around Newfoundland and Labrador, based on satellite imagery and on-the-ground (so to speak) reporting. It’s a project of Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism, which suggests that the bergs are seen more as tourist attractions than hazards to navigation.
President Trump’s budget proposes eliminating the EPA’s Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. That fact is no doubt what’s behind two publications posting maps earlier this month, only a couple of days apart, showing the environmental stresses on the Great Lakes basin.
Canadian Geographic reposted a map from their July/August 2013 issue:
And the Washington Post included the following map in an article on the proposed elimination of two EPA programs (including the aforementioned Great Lakes Restoration Initiative):
The CBC comedy show This Hour Has 22 Minutes has a sketch on the matter of Prince Edward Island being left off maps of Canada.
Canada is apparently suffering from an outbreak of maps that omit Prince Edward Island, and islanders are upset about it: culprits include a map at Vancouver’s airport, and a t-shirt sold by Hudson’s Bay Company. To be sure, in neither case are the maps meant for navigation, but this is a country where regional representation is a touchy subject.
Meanwhile, the Ottawa-Gatineau urban agglomeration (which is, as urban areas go, the closest to where I currently live) has, according to the census, grown by 5.5 percent since 2011, to a total population of 1.3 million. Much of that growth has occurred in suburbs that barely existed even when I moved to the region in 1999. This CBC Ottawa feature uses the Google Earth engine’s timelapse video function to chart the growth of seven of those suburbs. (Above: the Gatineau suburb of Aylmer.)
Statistics Canada released population and dwelling data from the 2016 Census yesterday. MountainMath’s CensusMapper project already has interactive maps based on that data: population change since 2011 (absolute and percentage), population density, and unoccupied dwellings—with presumably more to come, since the interface allows you to make your own census-derived maps.
Nova Scotia Community College’s Centre of Geographic Sciences, a tiny, 200-student campus in Lawrencetown, Nova Scotia, gets two writeups in Canada’s national newsmagazine, Maclean’s, as part of its annual campus guide: its unique marine geomatics program is profiled here, and the W. K. Morrison Special Collection, which I told you about last June, is profiled here.
I live 45 minutes outside the western Quebec city of Gatineau, which itself lies just across the river from Canada’s capital city, Ottawa. Yesterday Gatineau’s police service launched a crime map that shows seven categories of crime—arson, assault, break-ins, robbery, theft from a vehicle, theft of a vehicle, and vandalism. The cops are careful to stress (media release in French) that the map is for informational purposes only; the data isn’t suitable for data-crunching, and the locations aren’t precise enough to pinpoint specific buildings.
