Stephen Adam

This map was created for a Farmer Open House on 17 March, 2012. A great organization called the Urban Ecology Center (UEC) out of Milwaukee, WI hosted the event.

The event was an opportunity for people to meet local farmers who provide CSAs (Consumer Supported Agriculture) to the greater Milwaukee area. The map served as a starting point for attendees to identify farmers whose drop off sites are most convenient for them, at which point they could find the farmers' tables and get more information.

This was the Kathmandu bus route map I made while studying abroad in Nepal from 2003-04. The city's GIS branch was withholding the release of any data at the time since they were not being paid, instead I had to digitize a paper map, translate Department of Transportation documents—which were incorrect—that described the existing routes, and then ground-truth what was actually operating.

A quick-turnaround bike map for Tour de Farms, a Braise Local Food–hosted event. The map was designed to enable riders to quickly orient themselves while in the saddle, and a good part of the page's real estate was given to written directions for those that aren't as comfortable reading maps.

What I would change: When I was making the map I decided not to label each road on the route to avoid clutter, but looking back now it would have been better to tie the written instructions to the map by labeling the square symbol that denotes where the street name changes with the corresponding numeric step.

Here is another Funnel the Money (FtM) map of Azerbaijan. This particular map shows a health indicator, infant mortality.

FtM could be used to map and compare economic, health, poverty, demographic, and environmental indicators. I developed tools to allow local stewards to upload new data into the system.

By the time I left the project in 2008, 13 countries were represented by the tool.

Screenshot from an online tool I developed at WRI called Funnel the Money (FtM). The three side-by-side maps were meant to make comparison of user-selected indicators easier. In this example, the far left map is Nigeria's population by state. The middle map shows current federal government transfers to the states--note the disproportionate distribution to the southern oil-producing states. The far right map shows the federal government transfers to states if the oil-producing states in the south did not receive the federally mandated 13% derivation.

The FtM tool then went further by allowing the user to change the federal government's allocation equations and map the results. So for example, the oil derivation could be changed to 5%, or another indicator could be added to the equation, say poverty rate.

The tool was created with PHP, AJAX/Javascript, and MySQL. Later in development it was ported to Drupal. The maps were images exported from ESRI's ArcGIS and dynamically changed with PHP's GD image library. The idea was to create a low-bandwidth tool that could also be downloaded and used as a stand-alone application for those in the field or more rural areas.

This poster highlights the cost- and analytic-effectiveness of MODIS imagery in detecting and measuring tree cover change--deforestation and regrowth--on a global level.

This is a map I made for the WRI publication, Nature's Benefits in Kenya: An Atlas of Ecosystems and Human Well-Being.