Mapping is one of the core skills of the naturalist. Today, that mostly means GIS (geographic information systems), here divided into ArcMap, LiDAR and IfSAR. Explore those sub-categories or view the entire JuneauNature hierarchy at this site map.

A standard step for me in scoping any new project area in Lingit Aani is to assemble all historical photography. Earliest aerial cartographic missions were by the US Navy, in 1929 and 1948. An introduction to these resources is in Historic photo missions.

Toggling through the resulting time series, preferably as same-aligned ‘pageflippers’ on successive pages of a pdf, helps to understand how landforms and plant communities change. Next, I layer-on all the standard points, lines and polygons: Lingít place names, channel-types, geology, for example. Preparing a talk for the Wildlife Society on Focus and breadth, it occurred to me that while scientists ‘focus,’ a naturalist aspires to be broad. And one of the best ways to spread out our Strevelerian peripheral vision is to dabble in ‘foreign disciplines’—through the constellations of map layers prepared by experts.

A plea for graphicacy

If I could give one piece of advice to a high school student contemplating a career in forestry, fisheries, wildlife biology, geology, or any social science with a geographic component, it would be to take a course in GIS, the way we make ‘intelligent’ maps. Demand for facility in GIS will only increase through coming decades.

In Map-making with children, a book that’s been important to Discovery naturalists since our founding, David Sobel pointed out that that graphicacy—logical partner to the other ‘acy’s of liter-, numer- and articulacy—has been better understood and nurtured in Britain than in the Americas. When you can’t explain something verbally, so, draw a diagram or map in the mud, or pull out your phone to show the picture you took, you’re practicing graphicacy.

Allow me just one example of “ill-graphicacy,” as annoying to the cartographically fluent as illiteracy is to the well-read. This malapropism displays reliance on secondary sources; ie, everyone else says it, so it must be correct.

Satellite images?!  Hmmmm. . . .Even knowledgeable bio–&-geologists routinely refer to online app-imagery as “satellite” photos. Whether from Google Earth, BING, or ArcGIS Online, they are rarely from satellites. An obvious clue is tree-lean. On true satellite imagery, or even very high plane-base photos such as the Navy 1948s or NASA 1979s, tree crowns are centered and ‘straight-up appearing. In contrast on an orthomosaic, stitched from photos taken only a few thousand feet up, trees around the edges of each image will appear to lean

In this section