Today's 30DayMapChallenge is - Prompting Only

Yesterday Andy Woodruff posted this animated contour map:

Have you ever wondered how many satellites have passed overhead while you've been going about your daily business? Probably quite a few. But how many of them were actually looking at you? Watched is an intriguing new interactive map which attempts to answer that question by revealing which satellites have passed over any location on Earth during the last seven days, and, more interestingly, which of them actually took a photograph.

Visit Watched and enter any location in the world. The map will then reconstruct the satellite activity above that spot over the previous week, identifying the satellite that passed within viewing range and searching public satellite imagery archives for photographs captured during those passes.

Cet article est le dernier de la série consacrée à la collaboration avec Soilcloud et Apeiron, dont nous vous aviez fait part dans un précédent article, et à travers laquelle nous avions souligné l’importance de SFCGAL et de Giro3D.

Nous allons reparler ici du projet Albion, bien connu des utilisateurs de QGIS dans le minier !

Passer d’un projet client à un produit n’est jamais facile, passer d’une application desktop au web non plus, combiner les deux est un véritable challenge !

Mardi 24 novembre 2026, de 19h à 21h, Café de Flore, salle du premier étage, 172 boulevard Saint-Germain, 75006 Paris

Mardi 24 novembre 2026, notre troisième café géo de la saison 2026-2027 sera consacré au thème du paysage en s’intéressant particulièrement aux questions du cadre de vie, de l’environnement et du patrimoine. Pas moins de trois intervenants ont été invités pour traiter de ce sujet : le philosophe Jean-Marc Besse, les géographes Jean-Louis Tissier et Emilie Richard, cette dernière étant par ailleurs Inspectrice des sites en Gironde.

Vous remarquez une erreur sur la carte ? Vous pouvez la faire remonter en faisant un signalement.

Avant de faire votre signalement, nous attirons votre attention sur le fait que certains thèmes ne feront pas l’objet d’une valorisation.

Décalage entre le PCIexpress et la photographie aérienne :

Du 2 au 19 avril 2027
18 jours – 16 nuits
Circuit en pension complète

There is something undeniably romantic about casting a message in a bottle into the ocean. After all, what could be more enchanting than surrendering a personal secret to the tides, with nothing but the hope that it might one day wash ashore and find its way into a stranger's hands?

Tell the Sky takes this idea to the skies. However with this interactive map, instead of throwing a bottle into the ocean, you write a message on a glowing virtual lantern and release it into the wind. Carried by real-world wind currents, your lantern drifts across the world until someone catches it, reads your message and adds one of their own before sending it on its way again.

Koch, P., Stojkoski, V. et CA Hidalgo (2024). « Augmenting the availability of historical GDP per capita estimates through machine learning  » [Augmenter la disponibilité des estimations historiques du PIB par habitant grâce à l'apprentissage automatique]. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). URL : https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2402060121

Today's #30DayMapChallenge is Utopia.

There have been lots of pixel-art maps appearing online recently. I covered several of these projects in my recent Pixelate the World post. For today's challenge I thought it might be interesting to create a pixelated map of London – not as it is, but as it might look in an ideal world.

Greater London covers approximately 1,591 square kilometres. If each zoomed-in map tile covers roughly 0.15 square kilometres, I would need in the region of 10,600 images to create enough tiles to cover the entire capital. That's a few too many for a simple map challenge, so I decided to create a much smaller map - using just one tile - of Trafalgar Square.

29/10/2026-04/11/2026

Today's #30DayMapChallenge is 10 minute map.

My Mount Fuji map took 30 seconds.

Vibe-coding might be cheating (and perhaps even the end of civilisation as we know it), but it really can help developers create online maps very, very quickly. To create my map, I simply entered the following prompt into ChatGPT:

'I have downloaded a geojson of Mount Fuji. Can you give me the code for a three.js illuminated neon contour map. Add an animation to rotate around the center of the mountain. My geojson URL is https://mapsmania.github.io/mapchallenge/contours.geojson'

It then took me 30 seconds to download and run the resulting HTML file. Job done!

For thousands of years, cartographers have been mapping more than just the known world. Medieval and early modern maps often mixed observed geography with religious beliefs, folklore and mythical stories, placing legendary cities, lost kingdoms and biblical locations alongside real-world places.

Mythical Tours is a fascinating narrated journey through this imaginary geography, using centuries of historical maps to track down the locations of places that many people today believe exist only in legend.

Source : Boehm, J. , Chaney, T. (2026). « Trade and the End of Antiquity », National Bureau od Economic Research. Working Paper 35156, april 2026. URL : https://www.nber.org/papers/w35156

If your children are too young to enjoy Untappd, you could introduce them to Birds Around the World instead. With this map, rather than tracking all the beers they've drunk, they can collect all the different birds they've discovered! Get them started with binoculars and field guides rather than pints and beer goggles.

Birds Around the World is an interactive 3D globe that allows children to explore the world's birdlife. Hundreds of bird species are represented on the globe, with each dot marking where a particular species can be found. Click on a bird to discover a photograph, its conservation status, what it eats and, best of all, a recording of its actual bird call.

Dans le cadre de notre initiative Security project for QGIS, nous avions identifié un lot intitulé Improve Memory Safety, que l’on pourrait traduire approximativement par Amélioration de la sécurité mémoire.

Aprés avoir travaillé sur ce sujet ces derniers mois, voici un condensé de la problématique et de ce qui a été réalisé jusque là.

Présenter ce sujet n’est pas forcément chose aisée. Je m’efforcerai tant que possible de ne pas entrer dans des détails trop techniques pour me concentrer sur les enjeux de la démarche.

Before mobile phones, radio and even the telegraph, fire beacons were used as an early warning system designed to alert communities to the approach of hostile forces. The beacons were deliberately positioned on prominent high ground, allowing one fire to be seen from another. When an enemy was spotted, a chain of burning beacons could then relay the warning across the landscape.

The system was particularly important during the threat of invasion by the Spanish Armada in 1588. Beacons could take various forms, from simple bonfires to barrels of pitch or iron fire baskets mounted on tall wooden poles. Some were substantial enough to have permanent structures.

A la faveur des mobilisations du mouvement lycéen et du mouvement social de l'automne 2026, on voit circuler de nombreuses cartes de parcours de manifestion sur Internet et dans les médias. A Paris, dans le cadre des défilés traditionnels Bastille-Nation, mais aussi dans d'autres centres-villes en France, les cortèges ont l'habitude d'emprunter des itinéraires symboliques à proximité des lieux de pouvoir. Suite aux violences urbaines qui ont émaillé l'Acte I de mobilisation le samedi 17 octobre 2026, des tensions assez fortes sont apparues concernant la question du tracé autorisé. Afin de protéger les commerces, le Ministère de l'Intérieur et la Préfecture de police de Paris ont demandé à ce que les cortèges soient déplacés sur de nouveaux itinéraires plus extérieurs, de la porte d'Italie à la porte de Vincennes ou encore de la porte de Bagnolet à celle de Charenton. Sous prétexte d'éviter les débordements, les manifestants ont commencé à soupçonne...

On October 19, 2026 the GeoServer project announced three releases: 3.0.2, 2.28.6 and 2.27.7. For most deployments these are maintenance and security updates. For organizations that must run their geospatial infrastructure under formal cryptographic requirements, 3.0.2 carries something more: a new FIPS community module, developed by GeoSolutions, that lets GeoServer run on top of a FIPS 140-3 validated cryptographic module. In this post we look at what the module enables, the engineering behind it, and what teams should plan before adopting it.

In October, YouGov published a small-multiple visualisation showing the popularity of regional names for alleyways in the UK. The maps in What else do Britons call an alleyway? are based on survey data. YouGov asked 39,224 Britons which words they personally use to describe an alleyway. The resulting maps show the percentage of people in each county or region who use particular terms.

I thought it might be interesting to also map the different words for alleyways that actually appear in street names around the UK.

If you want to know what happened in yesterday's midterm elections, you should probably start with The Economist's Swing from 2024 map. The map is paywalled, but the screenshot above tells the story rather well: almost the entire USA (perhaps with the exception of South Dakota) swung towards the Democrats.

Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) are key actors in the conservation and restoration of ecosystems worldwide. However, practice-oriented conservation groups face a major hurdle: evaluating the real-world impact of their management activities over large geographic areas. Traditional monitoring methods rely on labor-intensive on-the-ground surveys, which are difficult to sustain at scale. While satellite Earth Observation (EO) data, such as Copernicus Sentinel-2, offer wide-scale coverage and long-term time series, using them effectively requires complex domain knowledge, spatial data handling, and specialized data processing skills.

This week’s challenge is:

Contrairement à la pauvreté monétaire, l'Indice de Pauvreté Multidimensionnelle (IPM) mesure les privations que subissent directement les individus au quotidien dans des domaines aussi essentiels que la santé (sous-alimentation, mortalité infantile), l'éducation (fréquentation scolaire, nombre d'années de scolarité) ou encore le niveau de vie (accès à l'eau potable, à l'électricité, à l'assainissement, à un logement convenable). Pour rappel, la lutte contre la pauvreté sous toutes ses formes et partout dans le monde constitue le premier Objectif de développement durable (ODD). L'Indice de pauvreté multidimensionnelle (IPM) est l'une des mesures reconnues par l'ONU pour rendre compte des progrès accomplis dans ce sens. À mi-parcours du Programme 2030, en septembre 2023, l'Assemblée générale des Nations Unies a réaffirmé l'importance de l'ODD 1 en déclarant que « l'éradication de la pauvreté sous toute...

Today's #30DayMapChallenge is Polygons.

At the risk of starting World War III, I've created a map of Poland's Historical Borders. The map uses polygons to show how Poland's borders have changed at different points in its history. The historical boundaries were downloaded from OpenHistoricalMap.

MapLibre GL JS est une bibliothèque JavaScript open-source qui affiche des cartes interactives dans un navigateur, à partir de tuiles vectorielles ou d’images tuilées. Elle lit directement les fichiers de styles de la Géoplateforme et, depuis sa version 6.15, elle affiche aussi des tuiles dans une autre projection que Web Mercator, comme Lambert 93.

Dans cet article nous allons apprendre à :

It seems astonishing to me now that only a fortnight has passed since I climbed to the roof of Maps Mania Tower and proclaimed to the world that the Age of the Pixel Map had begun. And yet here I stand before you today, bearing the sad news of its demise and announcing, with no little ceremony, that The Era of the Voxel Map Has Arrived.

Two weeks ago, I observed that "One notable limitation shared by most of these pixelated maps is their single, fixed perspective." My proposed solution was to create a pixel map offering four distinct viewpoints: North, South, East and West.

Le mercredi 4 novembre aura lieu la rencontre mensuelle du groupe local bordelais 👐.

Vous pouvez nous rejoindre à 18h30 aux locaux d'Aquilenet pour discuter de vos cartographie, de vos contributions et de vos projets autour d'OpenStreetMap ! 🗺️

Petit apéro pour discuter OpenStreetMap à l'Étape 84 : tour de table des sujets et contributions de chacun⋅e et initiation à l'écosystème OpenStreetMap pour les nouvelles personnes ! Nous devrions occuper une des salles de réunion.

Tout le monde est bienvenu⋅e, même si vous débutez ou n'êtes pas (encore) venu·e à une rencontre locale ! 

(Il est nécessaire de prendre au moins une consommation par personne.)

For Day 2 of the #30DayMapChallenge, the theme is Lines. For my contribution, I've created MapterGLOW, an interactive 3D terrain map that turns elevation data into glowing neon contour lines.

The map uses elevation tiles from Mapterhorn to build a three-dimensional model of the landscape, overlaid with luminous cyan contour lines at 50-metre intervals. You can rotate the terrain, tilt the camera and zoom in and out to explore the topography from different angles.

As part of our Security project for QGIS initiative, we identified a work package titled “Improve Memory Safety.”

Having worked on this topic over the last few months, here is a summary of the issues involved and what has been accomplished so far.

It’s not an easy thing to present this topic. I’ll try not to dive into too much technical details to focus instead on the broader objectives and implications.

Dix postes sont ouverts à candidature dans des structures bretonnes partenaires :

What if every European capital sent out a car at exactly the same moment, with the aim of reaching every town and village in Europe before its rivals? Which capital would claim the most territory, and how far would its influence extend beyond its own national borders?

If Every European Capital Sent Out a Car at the Same Moment is an intriguing interactive map from Copilot Travel that attempts to answer these questions. It imagines 38 cars setting off simultaneously from 38 European capitals, with each car travelling outwards along the road network at typical driving speeds. Every location in Europe is then assigned to whichever capital's car can reach it first.

Recently, I was very impressed by 10 Years, 10 Adventures, a collection of ten WebGL-powered animated travel maps featuring 3D terrain, animated elements and trip narration. So, for today's #30DayMapChallenge, I decided to try creating something similar: a 3D map of Cap d'Antibes, which I recently visited in the South of France.

My interactive 3D Map of Cap d’Antibes lets you fly around the peninsula, discover some of its best-known landmarks and view the route of an incredible coastal walk. The map includes clickable points of interest, with three photographs I took on my vacation. You can also follow an animated walking route along the coastal Sentier de Tirepoil, watching the route gradually draw itself across the 3D terrain.

22/10/2026-28/10/2026

Soon after I posted my One Hundred Famous Views of Edo Map, Keir Clarke posted about another map of Japanese woodblock prints on his Maps Mania blog, well worth a read if you want to learn a bit about Japanese landscape art in the 19th C. It turns out that there are a lot more than Hiroshige’s One Hundred (which are actually 119) and someone had made a map of 297 of these prints across 5 series which had lost its base map and had a couple of other glitches. Keir threw down a challenge “Perhaps Steven could take a sneak peek at the map’s JavaScript, which contains the coordinates of all the woodblock prints featured, and use them to expand the scope of his own map.�...