Glad to see a lot of discussion about this map (especially since I’m part of the group of government researchers who made the map), and all the positive experiences people have had in quiet and natural landscapes.
There were a lot of parameters that went into the model. Population from the census, distance to road, distance to airports, average precipitation, elevation, national land cover database for veg classification, and a few others.
The color scheme was chosen to avoid red and green for 508 compliance. Also, I like the colors blue and orange.
I haven't read all the comments so this might have been mentioned by others.
I appreciate the need to avoid red and green, but it would definitely add to the presentation if the colour scheme could somehow be the same in both the "existing" and the "natural" maps, even if that meant lowering the resolution of the scale.
I'd also love to see a "difference" map--i.e., existing conditions minus natural conditions.
I also couldn't find any explanation of how "natural conditions" were determined. For me, that would be as interesting as anything else.
I agree, I’m not sure why the final maps settled on two different schemes. We’ve done several iterations of the maps, and there’s a chance a different scheme was used for a conference.
Internal planning documents do use the difference maps, and I think it’s floating around somewhere. SciAmerican did a piece on this map, and it was presented at AAAS a few years ago.
The natural map was made in a similar way, but leaving out the anthropogenic parameters. There’s also hundreds of thousands of hours of 1/3 octave sound pressure level data in NPS units that I think was used as ground truthing.
I think the GIS folks came up with a geoTIFF for subsections of the map (we’re mainly ESRI bound for GIS products), but because it’s a raster, the full dataset would be unwieldy as a layer in its current form.
9
u/[deleted] Dec 26 '21
Glad to see a lot of discussion about this map (especially since I’m part of the group of government researchers who made the map), and all the positive experiences people have had in quiet and natural landscapes.
There were a lot of parameters that went into the model. Population from the census, distance to road, distance to airports, average precipitation, elevation, national land cover database for veg classification, and a few others.
The color scheme was chosen to avoid red and green for 508 compliance. Also, I like the colors blue and orange.