Where Our Map Data Comes From: The Sources Behind Every Mapographics Map

We do not invent our maps. Each poster is drawn from a published scientific or open dataset, and we list the source so you can check it. Here is where each map comes from, in plain words. The full references are on the data references page and under Data references on every product page.

Air, sea and borders

• Flight routes - a modelled global passenger-flow matrix for the air network in 2010 (Huang et al., 2013, PLoS ONE).
• Airport density and distance to airport - the OpenFlights database, compiled from OurAirports and the Digital Aeronautical Flight Information File.
• Shipping routes - the cumulative human impacts dataset by Halpern and colleagues (2015).
• Political borders - Marine Regions, from the Flanders Marine Institute.

Earth and nature

• Night light - satellite night-time light composites from NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information.
• Rivers - Allen and Pavelsky (2018), Global Extent of Rivers and Streams, in Science.
• Forest cover - Hansen et al. (2013), high-resolution global maps of 21st-century forest cover change, in Science.
• Land cover - Chen et al. (2014), open access Earth land-cover map, in Nature.
• Valleys and hills - NASA elevation data.
• Arctic bathymetry - the SRTM30_PLUS global bathymetry and elevation data (Becker et al., 2009).
• Status of biodiversity - the Biodiversity Intactness Index by Newbold et al. (2016), from the Natural History Museum Data Portal.
• Endangered species - IUCN Red List data, processed by Mapographics.

People and infrastructure

• Roads - the Global Roads Inventory Project (Meijer et al., 2018), from globio.info.
• Railways and power lines - OpenStreetMap, the open map built by volunteers.
• Power stations - the Global Power Plant Database, from the World Resources Institute with Google, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Enipedia and the Global Energy Observatory.
• Population density - WorldPop and CIESIN at Columbia University (2018).
• Human biomes - Ellis et al. (2010), Anthropogenic transformation of the biomes, 1700 to 2000.
• Human footprint - Venter et al. (2016), Global Terrestrial Human Footprint Maps for 1993 and 2009, in Scientific Data.

A portrait of a moment

Every dataset describes a particular moment: the flight matrix is for 2010, the forest data covers change into the early 2010s, the population grid is from 2018. A Mapographics print is a portrait of the world as that dataset saw it, not a live feed - which is part of what makes it worth hanging on a wall.

Want the stories behind the maps? Read our Map Stories, or explore what data art is and browse the prints.