GIS & Geospatial Data

This guide provides a centralized link to data and resources available to University of Arizona faculty, staff, and students, as well as for the public. If you have any questions or special request for data, help with your GIS, or maps please use the contact links for library personnel on the left side of the page.

What is GIS?

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Revisiting the Spilhaus Projection

The Map Room explains the origins of a recently-viral image which shows a rendering of the Spilhaus Projection. The projection itself was first create in 1942 by Athelstan Spilhaus.

In Spilhaus’s oceanic projection, centered on Antarctica, the world’s oceans form a single, uninterrupted body of water"

https://www.maproomblog.com/2018/09/about-the-spilhaus-projection/

Visualizing Indigenous Persistence during Spanish Colonization of the San Francisco Bay Area

An interesting Esri StoryMap detailing the presence of indigenous territories in the SF Bay area. 

https://arcg.is/091X45

From the googlemaps mania blog:

"By tracking the number of baptisms in native communities it is possible to view the spread of the Spanish missions' control over the indigenous people and to see the areas where native communities were initially outside of the missions' sphere of influence. The map also uses archaeological evidence to demonstrate where native communities persisted. This evidence includes radiocarbon dating of indigenous sites after the Spanish missions arrived and the lack of non-indigenous artifacts (glass, metal and ceramics) to show where the exchange of goods with missions was limited."

Cartography Playground

A great resource to explore different aspects and points of good cartographic practices.

"A simple and interactive website for explaining cartographic algorithms, problems and other matters. It is aimed at students of cartography who want to refresh and deepen their knowledge."

http://129.187.45.33/CartographyPlayground/

USGS OWI Office Producing Geospatial R Tutorials

Over the next couple of weeks, the USGS Office of Water Information is producing consecutive tutorial materials detailing introductory concepts to geospatial analysis using the R language.

https://owi.usgs.gov/blog/intro-best-practices/

List of 150+ Publicly accessible State GIS Servers

In line with his efforts to document federal gis servers (here), Joseph Elfelt with mappingsupport.com is also building a list of publicly accessible state GIS servers that are not easily found or accessed. Available in a pdf here:

https://mappingsupport.com/p/surf_gis/list-federal-state-county-city-GIS-servers.pdf

List of 50+ Publicly accessible Federal GIS Servers

Joseph Elfelt with mappingsupport.com gathered a list of more than 50 publicly accessible GIS servers not easily accessible and published them in a pdf report. Note that these are not services that can be easily found on data.gov.

https://mappingsupport.com/p/surf_gis/list-federal-state-county-city-GIS-servers.pdf