Fusion tables aren’t new, but if you haven’t seen them before, they’re a great way to take your datasets and map them, while making summaries of the data. You can embed the results and make decent maps with the data for use on the web. Google says “Bust your data out of its silo! Get more from data with Fusion Tables. Fusion Tables is an experimental data visualization web application to gather, visualize, and share data tables.”

This group is a federal source for scientific information needed by managers, decision makers, and the public to protect, enhance, and restore the ecosystems in the Upper Mississippi River Basin, the Midwest, and worldwide. The page has a great suite of spatial tools they have developed for spatial analysis and decision support systems.

A new mapping project builds from the climate justice movement to show priority areas for keeping fossil fuels in the ground. GIS is used both by those who want to extract fossil fuels and those who want to move away from them.

The current report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on a subsegment of GIS professionals shows 29% growth in a year in the sector and median pay of $61,000.

An article showing how to get started using imagery from Sentinel 2. For those who aren’t familiar with it, Sentinel 2 is the new satellite constellation from the European Space Agency that offers 15m pixels and 2-3 day return intervals at mid-latitudes. I’m so excited for it :).

An organization creating time-series ecological datasets, rooted to observation stations. The site has an integrated data portal for downloading data.

The NorWeST temperature database recently received an update (now better covering California!). For background, the database was compiled from hundreds of biologists and hydrologists working for >100 resource agencies and contains >150,000,000 hourly temperature recordings at >20,000 unique stream sites. Those temperature data were used with spatial statistical network models to develop 30 historical and future climate scenarios at 1-kilometer resolution for >1,000,000 kilometers of stream.

Do you use SQLAlchemy for database access in Python? Well, GeoAlchemy extends it to work with spatial data!

A few years ago I developed some one-click bookmarklets that will open a KML file of the day’s current satellite imagery in Google Earth. It’s really interesting in fire season, and also for major weather systems. Feel free to use them yourself, and enjoy exploring the Earth as it looks today!

The venerable XKCD presents a guide to figuring out the age of an undated world map based upon which features are named on it. It’s a few weeks old now, but if you missed it, it’s worth seeing.