Basketball court designed as a national park map

Kirk Goldsberry, whose basketball charts you might recognize, made the Naismith International Park Map:

This map blends two of my passions: cartography and hoops. The elevation surface on the map is derived from the most common scoring areas in the NBA during the 2019-20 season. Higher places indicate the areas where NBA scorers scored the most from. Naturally this includes the areas near the rim and the areas just outside the 3-point line.

The original plan was to make a fun map poster emphasizing the best scorers from the 2019-20 season, but the project quickly spiraled out of control as I started to label more and more historic places.

So good.

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Park sounds before and during the pandemic

With lockdown orders arounds the world, places that we’re allowed to go sound different. The MIT Senseable City Lab looked at this shift in audio footprint through the lens of public parks:

Using machine learning techniques, we analyze the audio from walks taken in key parks around the world to recognize changes in sounds like human voices, emergency sirens, street music, sounds of nature (i.e., bird song, insects), dogs barking, and ambient city noise. We extracted audio files from YouTube videos of park walks from previous years, and compared them with walks recorded by volunteers along the same path during the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis suggests an overall increase in birdsong and a decrease in city sounds, such as cars driving by, or construction work. The interactive visualization proposed in Sonic Cities allows users to explore and experience the changing soundscapes of urban parks.

The 3-D view shown above is visually interesting, but the top-down view is the easiest to read, looking like a stacked area chart over a map.

At distinct points on the mapped paths, a gradient line represents the distribution of quieter and louder sounds. Louder sounds appear to take up more space during the pandemic.

It’s hard to say how accurate the sound classification is through this view, but as I poked around, it seemed a bit rough. For example, the chart for Central Park in New York shows bird sounds making about 0% of the footprint, but you can hear birds pretty easily in the audio clips. I’d also be interested in how they normalized between YouTube clips and their own recorded audio to get a fair comparison.

Nevertheless, it’s an interesting experiment both statistically and visually. Worth a look.

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Peak accommodation type at national parks

When staying at national parks, some people choose a tent. Some bring an RV. Others might stay in a lodge or sleep under the stars. Of course, it depends on where they stay and the weather during any given time of year. Using data from the National Park Service, Jordan Vincent charted all these things with a multi-faceted approach.

Each band represents patterns for an accommodation type over a year, band width represents number of nights stayed per month, and radius represents volume. Average temperature sits in the background.

Oftentimes, putting so many variables together in one view hides patterns, but this abstract view feels intuitive, even if less concrete. [Thanks, Dario]

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Science Tourist: Algonquin Park, Ontario

I’ve taken you to a lot of indoor locations on my previous Science Tourist trips. Granted, one of them had a rain forest, but it was still indoors. Time to put on your hiking boots, because we’re going outside today, to Algonquin Park in Ontario, Canada!

Algonquin Park is huge. Their FAQ says it’s 7,630 kmĀ² (2,946 square miles). A highway cuts through the southern part of the park, and that’s the only car route through the park. If you want to go further into the interior, you need a canoe to navigate the 1500 lakes. I’ve never gone that far. Both of my trips to the park have hovered close to the highway, but there’s still a lot to see there, and if you pick a quiet weekend to visit, you might not see anyone else on the hiking trails or on the lakes.

lake

Toronto and Ottawa are each several hours away, so most people spend the night in the park. The first time I went camping in Algonquin Park, we had just started unloading the car at the campsite when the people from the neighbouring campsite told us to stop doing what we were doing and come over immediately with our cameras. There was a moose calf!

moose

Its mom was nowhere to be seen, but we kept a safe distance anyway. Even a young moose is the size of a horse.

Along the highway in Algonquin Park are about a dozen trails. Each one highlights a different feature of the park, and most of the trails come with a guide booklet that explains the local ecology. They will tell you what types of animals live in the area, and how they interact with the forest. One of the walking trails takes a slightly different approach.

The Lookout Trail is only 1.9 kilometers (just over a mile) but it’s not the most comfortable stroll. It comes with a warning:

Warning

Don’t let the warning scare you off. This trail is 1.9 km of non-stop science! The trail booklet focuses entirely on the park’s geology, and contains diagrams of the formation of gneiss and granite over a billion years ago. It’s like a miniature geology textbook. Better than a textbook, because you are physically present at each of the locations it describes.

booklet

gneiss

One of the first stops is an enormous boulder. The guidebook explains how it was moved here over thousands of years during the last ice age: “The fourth and last ice sheet melted back from the Highway 60 area of Algonquin just 11,000 years ago. Before that, as much as three kilometres of glacial ice, towering into the clouds, crushed this very spot.” You can see why I kept this trail guide. It’s amazing. And this was only the beginning of the hike!

boulder

Halfway through the trail, you reach the cliff that gives the trail both its name and its warning sign.

algonquinEva

The view is amazing. “The appearance of this landscape is spectacular”, agrees the guide booklet, “but there is something else about it which is even more breathtaking.”

What could it be?

“We now know that the entire landscape before you was once 20 km below the Earth’s surface.”

Whaaaat??

20kmRock

Erosion by winds, water, ice, and snow scraped down 20 KILOMETRES of ROCK LAYER. The process is continuing today, at a rate of 2cm per thousand years. When you’re standing on the cliff, the view is of more immediate importance than the booklet. That’s probably a good thing, because buried in this section of the guide is the casual mention that “every once in a long while, part of the cliff falls off.” A longer section at a signpost further down the trail describes in detail the cliff is shaped by rock falls, but by that time you’re walking between the trees, on the way back to starting point of the trail, and not out on the open cliff.

Bonus: you might see chipmunks and (red!) squirrels on this trail as well!

chipmunk

squirrel

Credits: Photo of the moose taken by my friend. Photos of me taken by my sister. (The photos are from two separate trips. That’s why the vegetation colour doesn’t match.)
Trail booklet “Lookout Trail: Algonquin Geology” published by The Friends of Algonquin Park and available online. Guide booklet written by Dan Strickland with illustrations by Howard Coneybeare and scientific advice from Dr. A. Davidson of the Geological Survey of Canada.