Below are a few examples of the types of maps I have made. I have made hundreds more and if you have a particular need, please contact me to discuss your project.
A recent trail map with the many features important to hikers, including parking areas, trail names, topographic lines, and hill shading to give the map a three-dimensional look. Even informative maps can be made attractive.Local and regional land trusts and conservation initiatives in southern New England. Providing such a dense amount of overlapping information in an understandable manner can be an enjoyable challenge.A trail map designed for etching in an aluminum sign, limits the color palette to black and white.Average monthly temperatures (expressed as differences from Martha’s Vineyard) across New England for each month. The unusual circular arrangement of the months allows the viewer to easily see changes in temperature over the year and between seasons (from Foster, 2017).Regional Conservation Partnerships (RCPs) in New England and Mid-Atlantic states. This map illustrates another way of showing much overlapping information in an easy-to-understand format, while the simple green inset map shows how the RCPs form a network covering much of New England (a collaboration with Bill Labich from Highstead).Some of the same RCP information as above but here it highlights three groups of RCPs (left panel) and individual RCPs (middle panel) based on some of their conservation projects. The birds-eye view, or oblique, angle provides visual interest to catch the reader’s attention (a collaboration with Highstead).
Ecologists are able to extract cores of mud from the bottoms of some ponds; these cores contain layers of plant pollen that are deposited yearly in the lake and serves as a record of what plants grew nearby hundreds or thousands of years ago. This multi-panel map shows changes in forest types since deglaciation around 14,000 years before present (ybp). Using highly contrasting colors for the pond-location markers makes broad temporal patterns easy to see, and meaningful letters in the symbol reduce how often the viewer has to refresh their memory by looking at the legend (Oswald et al., 2018).
XXXXX (from Foster, 2017)
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Citations:
Foster, David R. 2017. A Meeting of Land and Sea: Nature and the Future of Martha’s Vineyard. Yale University Press.
Duranleau, Deena L. 2009. Flexible Sedentism: The Subsistence and Settlement of Coastal New England and New York. Ph.D. thesis, Harvard University.
Guswa, A. J., Hall, B., Cheng, C., Thompson, J. R. 2020. Co-designed Land-use Scenarios and their Implications for Storm Runoff and Streamflow in New England. Environmental Management 66: 785–800.
Orbay-Cerrato, M. E., Oswald, W. W., Doughty, E. D., Foster, D. R., Hall, B. R. 2016. Historic grazing in southern New England, USA, recorded by fungal spores in lake sediments. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 26: 159-165.
Oswald, W. W., Foster, D. R., Shuman, B. N., Doughty, E. D., Faison, E. K., Hall, B. R., Hansen, B. C. S., Lindbladh, M., Marroquin, A., Truebe, S. A. 2018. Subregional variability in the response of New England vegetation to postglacial climate change. Journal of Biogeography 45: 2375–2388.
