The Mappiest Day! Tomorrow, November 14, 2018.

I paid a professional to make this…

GIS Day is definitely not something I made up, no matter how many people accuse me of it. It’s also not a day where people buy GIS practitioners gifts, as I was asked last year (although I should have answered yes…).

Whack Fact: GIS Day has been around officially since 1999, and is a day where GIS professionals share all things GIS (especially GISsy cakes) with the rest of the world (or maybe just their local communities, schools, or workplaces). It is celebrated each year on the Wednesday of Geography Awareness Week, which is the third week of November. That means GIS Day falls on Wednesday, November 14th this year.

You can look on the GIS Day website (you’ll need to scroll about halfway down the home page) to search the map of registered events and see if there’s a celebration near you. A few celebrations in the Pacific Northwest include Joint Agency GIS Day put on by Washington State in Olympia (which is like a free mini-GIS conference complete with a keynote speaker, presentations, and posters), a GIS Day evening event in Portland with free pizza, networking and a raffle, a Humanitarian Mapathon hosted by OpenStreetMap and Portland State University in Portland (no mapping experience needed!), and a GIS Day event with presentations and posters at the University of Idaho.

Happy GIS Day!

A Few of my Favorite Things!

So many dams…

Maps, maps, interactive maps!!! A new edition of the Pacific Northwest Atlas is available, and this one is electronic and interactive! There are eight chapters on a variety of topics including energy resources, water, and natural hazards. The maps are beautiful, and you can drill down to get links to the actual source data! This cat is seriously geeking out! This is a great resource for curious minds, as well as scientists trying to figure out how we can make it out alive. And did I mention the maps are beautiful? And the narrative and language is so poetic!