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PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Weather Service National...

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If you're a visual learner like myself, then you know maps, charts and infographics can really help bring data and information to life. Maps can make a point resonate with readers and this collection aims to do just that.

Hopefully some of these maps will surprise you and you'll learn something new. A few are important to know, some interpret and display data in a beautiful or creative way, and a few may even make you chuckle or shake your head.

If you enjoy this collection of maps, the Sifter highly recommends the r/MapPorn sub reddit. You should also check out ChartsBin.com. There were also fantastic posts on Business Insider and Bored Panda earlier this year that are worth checking out. Enjoy!

Pangea was a supercontinent that existed during the late Paleozoic and early Mesozoic eras, forming about 300 million years ago. It began to break apart around 200 million years ago. The single global ocean which surrounded Pangaea is accordingly named Panthalassa.

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40 Maps That Will Help You Make Sense of the World

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If you're a visual learner like myself, then you know maps, charts and infographics can really help bring data and information to life. Maps can make a point resonate with readers and this collection aims to do just that. Hopefully some of these maps will surprise you and you'll learn something new.

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Maps tell stories about natural and human geography and geopolitics, whether by displaying the shapes of landforms and locations of cities or by highlighting global fashion trends or the routes of explorers.

But many students get overwhelmed by their own unfamiliarity with geography or by what might seem like an overload of information. Just like any other kind of visual thinking, learning to read maps accurately and with confidence takes practice.

In this lesson, we provide strategies to help students gain that confidence so they can interpret even the most complex historical or current maps. We also suggest ways for using current events maps as a tool to better understand both history and what's going on in the world today.

How do you use maps in your classroom? Let us know in the comments.
Analyzing Maps
Learning how to analyze maps is a skill that requires practice. Below, we propose an extended process that can be used over several days, weeks or even a school year - and that borrows from the approach we outlined for analyzing political cartoons. The strength of this process is that it does not force students to immediately come up with right answers, but instead emphasizes visual thinking and close reading skills. It provides a way for all students to participate, while at the same time building up students' academic vocabulary so they can develop more sophisticated analyses over time.
Open-Ended Questioning
We suggest beginning map analysis using the same three-question protocol we utilize every Monday for our " What's Going On in This Picture? " feature to help students bring to the surface what the map is saying:

What is going on in this map?

What do you see that makes you say that?

What more can you find?

These simple, open-ended questions push students to look closely at the map without pressuring them to come up with a "correct" interpretation. Students can notice details and make observations without rushing, while the cyclical nature of the questions keeps sending them back to look for more details.

The Library of Congress suggests a similar open-ended approach to reading maps in this teacher's guide (PDF), but adds one very important element to the analysis: Think about the source.

Observe: Ask students to identify and note details.

Reflect: Encourage students to generate and test hypotheses about the source.

Question: Invite students to ask questions that lead to more observations and reflections.

Reflecting on who is the source is an important habit for students to adopt for whenever they are working with documents, and with enough practice it should become just one more thing students look for when analyzing maps.
Developing Map Vocabulary and a Keener Eye
Once students gain confidence noticing details and suggesting interpretations, always backed up by evidence, it is useful to introduce them to specific map elements, such as key, scale, longitude and latitude lines, compass rose and contour lines, that cartographers frequently use. Over time they should also become familiar with common map types, such as topographic and political maps, and even some map projections.

Helping students recognize and identify these cartographers' tools will enable them to make more sophisticated analyses.

The National Archives provides this map analysis worksheet (also available as a PDF), which asks students to identify a map's type and any unique physical qualities.

When students get comfortable using the relevant academic vocabulary to describe what's going on in a map, we suggest returning to the open-ended analysis questions we started with, so students can become more independent and confident map readers.
How to Use Current Events Maps to Better Understand Both History and the World Today
Maps representing historical events, such as the spread of the Black Death during the Middle Ages or the rise of Latin-American independence movements, are commonly taught documents in history classes. But for many history and social studies teachers, maps detailing current events aren't as obvious a classroom resource.

Here are some suggestions for how to turn global current events maps published in The New York Times and elsewhere into teaching tools. (In 2014, we published a similar lesson about teaching with United States maps, " Baseball, Happiness and Immigration: Exploring American Society and History With New York Times Maps.")
Comparing History With Current Events
One way to incorporate a global current events map into a lesson is to tie it to the history you're already studying.

For example, for classes studying the Silk Road, it would be interesting to compare this map illustrating China's global trade with a map of Silk Road trade routes (PDF).

After looking closely at each map using the questioning protocol described above, students can consider:

What does each map show about China's trading partners?

What similarities or differences do you notice?

Or, students can compare the current global refugee crisis using this world map or these regional maps with previous refugee crises, such as the one after World War II or the one resulting from the partition of India and Pakistan.

Another idea is to use these maps showing Russia's recent military buildup to make comparisons with military tensions during the Cold War.

And, students could look at a map displaying the distribution of Shiite and Sunni Muslims in the Middle East, and then compare sectarian tensions within the Muslim world today with other historical examples of sectarian and religious conflict.

What other ideas can you come up with to compare historical and current events? Please share them in the comments section.
Using Current Events Maps to Teach ... Current Events
Many teachers set aside time in their curriculum to cover current events - perhaps as a "Currents Events Friday" routine or whenever major news breaks. Teachers typically might select an article, or assign students to find their own articles, to read, analyze and discuss.

But as an alternative, or a complement, to reading news articles, teachers can ask students to analyze visual images about current events, such as photographs, graphs and maps.

Below is a selection of additional maps The Times published in the past year that can help bring the important news of the day alive for students - and help them practice their map-reading skills at the same time:
Syrian Civil War Climate Change ISIS and Terrorism China Afghanistan Israel and the West Bank Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 Going Further: Students Make Their Own Maps
One way to get students more comfortable and proficient at reading maps is to give them the opportunity to design their own. With so many free online mapmaking tools, students can make their own maps illustrating data on almost anything they can imagine.

National Geographic's MapMaker Interactive is one such tool that lets students add layers to a variety of base maps. For example, they can layer volcanic eruptions on a topographic map (as in the above example), or lights at night on a satellite map. Students can display their finished maps in a gallery with written captions that explain the information their maps illustrate.

And since maps are one of the best-known kinds of infographics, you might look through this post, Data Visualized: More on Teaching With Infographics, for additional ideas.
Related Lesson Plans Baseball, Happiness and Immigration: Exploring American Society and History With New York Times Maps All Over the Map: 10 Ways to Teach About Geography Where They Were: Using Maps Across the Curriculum Teaching With Infographics | Social Studies, History, Economics 36 Hours in Learning: Creating Travel Itineraries Across the Curriculum

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Lesson Plan | Analyzing Maps to Better Understand Global Current Events and History

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Maps tell stories about natural and human geography and geopolitics, whether by displaying the shapes of landforms and locations of cities or by highlighting global fashion trends or the routes of explorers. But many students get overwhelmed by their own unfamiliarity with geography or by what might seem like an overload of information.

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All Over the Map: 10 Ways to Teach About Geography

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We have created 10 activities for teaching about geography using Times content, all related to the National Geography Standards.

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Like millions of other Americans, I watch the NFL on a regular basis. However, just like millions of other viewers, most Sundays I am not sure which games will be on my television. I live in Austin, so there's a good chance I'll get to see the Cowboys and Texans, but beyond that, there's no way for me to know what to expect. Because of the nature of the league's broadcast deal, and the realities of "regional coverage," every Sunday the league's national broadcast partners Fox and CBS assign different games to different markets, based on both regional and national interest. So unless you have a premium NFL television package, your location greatly affects your viewing experiences. Folks in Wisconsin get to watch their Packers every week; folks in northern Florida "get" to see the Jags.

For years, the strange geographic structures that underpinned league broadcasts were almost entirely obscured from the average consumer. People would turn on their TVs expecting to see one game only to be disappointed by another. In 2005, one of these chronically disappointed viewers was J.P. Kirby, a Patriots fan and self-described "map nerd." "The station's site said one thing, the guide in my newspaper said another, and what ended up showing was another game completely, and it wasn't the Pats game," Kirby, 32, a web designer in Fredericton, New Brunswick, told me by email. "I was pissed and figured there had to be a better way to figure this out." Kirby had an idea to expose the hidden geographic patterns that control our Sunday afternoons: He created a project dedicated to mapping out the NFL's weekly broadcast schedule.

Today, Kirby is still meticulously scanning the Web every week of the season to find football broadcast schedules for different markets around the United States. He then maps them out for all the world to see on 506sports.com. Here is one of his maps for this coming week. It's a simple map that shows which regions see which late game on CBS on Sunday afternoon.

As you can see, the country is split between those seeing San Diego at Green Bay (red), those seeing Baltimore at San Francisco (blue), and Washington state residents seeing Seattle host Carolina. Displaced Seahawks or Panthers fans in New York City won't get to see their favorite team on local television this week; instead, they'll be shown the Chargers-Packers game.

But while Kirby's project does a good job of visualizing the spatial coverage of NFL broadcasts each week, that's not all it does; the archive of data he's compiled over the years also helps us understand larger geographic patterns in NFL television. His data reveals which teams we see most and least often each season and across multiple seasons. It's a reflection of both regional broadcasting choices for Sunday day games and national programming selections for the night games on Thursdays, Sundays and Mondays. The choices matter throughout the U.S. and even outside of it: Kirby, who lives an hour from Maine, has access to U.S. networks, which is why he started collecting the data.

This map depicts which franchise has been the most commonly seen in different parts of the continental U.S. over the past six seasons.³

We expect the map to look like that: Georgians want to see Falcons games, for instance, while Michiganders want to see Lions games. However, things get a bit more unpredictable when we map the second most commonly televised team in each area.

There's a lot going on up there. With the exceptions of Carolina, Cleveland and San Diego, every team is the second most televised team somewhere. It's strange to see Minnesota mostly covered by Packer Green and the whole of Louisiana colored Cowboy blue, but there's some obvious regional logic there. The same goes for the vast area colored by Oakland black and Houston red: Someone has to play second fiddle to the 49ers and the Cowboys, and another team from the same state is the obvious candidate. You can't say the same about the Patriots being aired so often in the Carolinas, the random pocket of Eagles' ubiquity on televisions in southern Oklahoma and northeastern Texas, or the frequency with which Giants games are televised in greater Las Vegas.

Still, the main takeaway from this map is that them Cowboys are on TV a lot all over the place; they are by far the most broadcast team around the country. Over the past six seasons, they were either the first or second most commonly broadcast team in 95 of just over 200 markets around the U.S., a dominance that appears on the West Coast in markets including Seattle and Los Angeles, and on the East Coast in Jacksonville, Florida, and Greenville, North Carolina.

Between 2009 and 2014, every Nielsen market in the U.S. saw at least an average of nine of the Cowboys' 16 games each season, by far the most in the league. Just about the only time the Cowboys aren't dominating the airwaves is during bye weeks like this one.

While it's safe to say the Cowboys rule the national broadcast scene, they are by no means the only team that we all see on a regular basis. Below are the 16 most televised teams in the NFL.

Meanwhile, the Bills, Browns, Jags and Bucs are the teams broadcast least often nationwide. A vast majority of the country has seen these teams less than three times per year over the past six regular seasons. But as you can see, despite that meager nationwide showing, these teams are still broadcast often near their home cities.

We ranked teams by their share of TV markets, but the picture doesn't change much if we weight the markets by number of homes with televisions, to get an estimate of the potential number of viewers of each team. Even after accounting for the Giants' mammoth home New York City market, which has roughly one of every 15 TV homes in the country, Dallas is still king.

The NFL Sunday Ticket package exists for a reason: Many times people would rather watch a game other than the ones prescribed to them during regional coverage. Take it from someone who lived in Michigan when the Lions went 0-16: Sometimes regional loyalties subject us to terrible television experiences. But as long as the NFL's broadcast deals are structured as they are now, the programming choices dictated by these loyalties aren't going to change. Thanks to Kirby and 506sports.com, at least we can see we're not the only ones subjected to mediocre games.

And that hasn't changed this year. Although our maps only run through last season, Kirby confirms that the most broadcast team in 2015 is the Cowboys. "Even at 2-3, the networks are still in love with them," Kirby said.

CORRECTION (Oct. 16, 10:45 a.m.): An earlier version of this article incorrectly characterized the most televised NFL teams in greater Las Vegas. The Giants are the second-most-televised team but are not interrupting the dominance of the Cowboys, who are the most televised team in the region.

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Which NFL Team Are You Stuck Watching Every Sunday?

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Like millions of other Americans, I watch the NFL on a regular basis. However, just like millions of other viewers, most Sundays I am not sure which games will be on my television. I live in Austin, so there's a good chance I'll get to see the Cowboys and Texans, but beyond that, there's no way for me to know what to expect.

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Major Themes and Key Concepts underlying the geographical perspective: Location Space Place Scale Regions Globalization Important Geographic Skills, Technologies and Data Sources: GPS GIS Remote Sensing Mapping Census Data Spatial Thinking Favorite Specific Resources for this Unit: The Association of American Geographers, The Geographic Advantage TeachSpatial's Resources for Spatial Teaching and Learning National Geographic's What...

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As budding teenagers, our students have a pretty small worldview. Big History challenges them to expand that tiny bubble. Lesson 8.3's Personal Supply Chain activity especially shatters a lot of preconceived notions students have about the way the world works. As they trace the supply chain of a product they've chosen, they find that the process is much more complex than they ever imagined-and sometimes not as transparent as they'd like it to be. Even products manufactured in the USA use raw materials and energy sources from all over the world. Or as one student put it, "Nothing is as local as it seems."

I absolutely love watching their worldview explode. Here is our approach.

Step One: Made in (Insert Country Here)
To kick off the activity, we start by mapping where our shirts, shoes, electronics, backpacks, and notebooks are made. Then, we analyze the patterns and trends of the distribution of our stuff. We finish up by discussing the implications. Where in the world are our products NOT made? Why does it matter?

Step Two: What's a Supply Chain?
If you have the luxury of time (like few of us), I highly recommend watching The Story of Stuff. It's a great breakdown of four key components in the supply chain: supply, manufacturing, distribution, and consumption. If you're squeezed for time (like most of us), check out NPR's Planet Money Makes a T-Shirt.

This year, we only had the luxury of 10 minutes to try and get students to grasp the whole supply chain concept, so we handed out fun-sized candy bars and asked students to do some quick research on raw materials, factories, transportation, and forms of energy used in the process. ( Side note: The following day, I scolded a student for taking a phone call during class...only to find out he was on the phone with a representative from the Mars company, still unsatisfied with the answers he was getting about their palm oil suppliers. Worldview exploded.)

Step Three: Cut Them Loose!
Once they've explored the big picture, students are eager to get started on their own research. They choose an item and trace out its supply chain. Mapping their work is especially enlightening. As an extension, we also challenged students to map electronically using ArcGIS (check out this one of a surfboard). Here are some of the takeaways from our students:

"I realize now that certain companies can own companies I never knew of. It surprised me when I found out that SoBe is owned by PepsiCo."

"I learned that there is a lot of money involved. It takes a lot of time and energy to make and ship these products."

"It has opened my eyes to how big my carbon footprint is. I chose a product that I knew was made in America, and it makes me feel better about my use. I want to start using less and reduce my footprint. Because of this project, I know how to help the Earth."

About the author: Rachel Hansen is a high school history and geography teacher in Muscatine, IA. Rachel teaches the BHP world history course over two 180-day semesters to about 50 ninth- through twelfth-grade students each school year.

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NOTHING IS AS LOCAL AS IT SEEMS: ADVENTURES IN MAPPING A PERSONAL SUPPLY CHAIN

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Rachel Hansen, BHP Teacher Iowa, USA As budding teenagers, our students have a pretty small worldview. Big History challenges them to expand that tiny bubble. Lesson 8.3's Personal Supply Chain activity especially shatters a lot of preconceived notions students have about the way the world works.

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How We Did This

Why A T-Shirt?

We wanted to see the hidden world behind clothes sold in this country, so we decided to make a T-shirt. We wanted to make an ordinary shirt like the vast majority of the shirts sold in this country - not organic cotton, not hand-sewn in the United States.

To figure out how many shirts to make, and to raise money to pay for them, we turned to Kickstarter. Our goal was to sell 2,000 shirts. In the end, we sold 25,000.

(Thanks again to everyone who ordered a shirt. Really. Amazing. We couldn't have done it without you!)

Why A Squirrel?

The design on the shirt, a squirrel hoisting a martini glass, is a visual pun: a reference to the phrase "animal spirits" made famous by the economist John Maynard Keynes.

As Planet Money's David Kestenbaum put it recently: "Keynes' idea was that there's more to the markets than just numbers; there are people and emotions making decisions. And to the extent that we are finding the human element in the very dry subject of economics, it's actually perfect for us."

10 Reporters, 3 Continents, 1 Archipelago

We flew drones over Mississippi. We got mugged in Chittagong, Bangladesh. We met people whom we'll never forget - the actual people who make our clothing. At every location we had radio reporters and videographers.

More T-Shirt Stories!

Good news: We have more T-shirt stories than we could fit on this site.

For more, subscribe to the Planet Money podcast.

A Little Help From Our Friends

Adam Davidson, Planet Money co-founder, came up with the idea of doing this project in the first place more than three years ago.

We were inspired a lot by a book: The Travels Of A T-shirt In The Global Economy. In fact, we hired the author, Pietra Rivoli, to be an adviser on the project. She's a professor at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University.

Bawen, Indonesia: Jess Jiang faces the classic producer's dilemma: One machine tells a story. A thousand create a racket.

After several years of trying and failing to make a T-shirt from scratch, we finally found some help from Jockey Corp. Marion Smith, the director of global sourcing for Jockey, was patient with us on the phone. (T-shirts are knitted, not woven. They're made from something that looks like thread but is called yarn.) Eventually, Jockey agreed to sell us T-shirts - and, more important, to let us follow the creation of those shirts.

The Planet Money T-shirts are made of fabric that Jockey's textile experts developed. They're based on a design pattern Jockey uses for its own T-shirt line. Jockey introduced us to its suppliers in Bangladesh and Colombia, and those suppliers agreed to assemble our shirts. And Jockey designers helped us pick out the colors for our shirts.

Credits

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER: Alex Blumberg

PROJECT ADVISER: Pietra Rivoli/McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University

MANAGING PRODUCERS: Kainaz Amaria, Brian Boyer and Joshua Davis

PLANET MONEY: Quoctrung Bui, Zoe Chace, Jacob Goldstein, Jess Jiang, Caitlin Kenney, David Kestenbaum, Marianne McCune and Robert Smith

VIDEO DIRECTOR: Joshua Davis

MULTIMEDIA PRODUCERS: Kainaz Amaria, Joshua Davis, and Claire O'Neill

PHOTOGRAPHY AND VIDEO: Kainaz Amaria, Nacho Corbella, Joshua Davis, David Gilkey, Eric Helton, James Jensen, Soren Jensen, Katie Hayes Luke and David Nevala

DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT: Jeremy Bowers, Danny DeBelius, Alyson Hurt and Wes Lindamood ( Source code on GitHub)

WRITER: Jacob Goldstein

COPY EDITING: Janey Adams, Stephanie Federico, Avie Schneider and Susan Vavrick

ADDITIONAL PRODUCTION: Phia Bennin, Anirvan Ghosh, Frank Hernandez, Seth Maxon, Melissa Melvin-Rodriguez, Molly Messick, Eileen Mignoni, Urmila Ramakrishnan, Tiffany Salone and Alejandra Vengoechea

MOTION GRAPHICS: Suzanne Batmanghelichi and Adam Cole

SOUND EDITING: Drew Kennedy

LEGAL: Ashley Messenger and Brian Rideout

T-SHIRT ILLUSTRATOR: Bob Bianchini

ARCHIVAL VIDEO: AP Archive, U.S. Department of Agriculture ( via archive.org)

MUSIC:
"The Journey," "Goldengrove v2," "Wallflower" (Keith Kenniff/Unseen Music)
"Fire Ignorance," "Anthem" (Tyler Strickland)
"Club Coolada" (Cream Dream/Crash Symbols)
"Shade of Music" (Elias Music Library/Getty Music Library)
"B&G's" (Bela R. Balogh and Gabe Leavitt/3 Leg Torso)
"Stay Golden" (Au Revoir Simone/Moshi Moshi Records)
"Mirrors" (Crocodiles/Fat Possum Records)

SPECIAL THANKS: Coburn Dukehart; Jeffrey Silberman/Fashion Institute of Technology
Published December 2, 2013

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We wanted to see the hidden world behind clothes sold in this country, so we decided to make a T-shirt. We wanted to make an ordinary shirt like the vast majority of the shirts sold in this country - not organic cotton, not hand-sewn in the United States.

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by Colin K. Khoury, Harold A. Achicanoy, Carlos Navarro-Racines, Steven Sotelo, and Andy Jarvis at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT). Version 1.0 (May 2016). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International ( CC BY 4.0).

This work is associated with the publication:

Khoury CK, Achicanoy HA, Bjorkman AD, Navarro-Racines C, Guarino L, Flores-Palacios X, Engels JMM, Wiersema JH, Dempewolf H, Sotelo S, Ramírez-Villegas J, Castañeda-Álvarez NP, Fowler C, Jarvis A, Rieseberg LH, and Struik PC (2016). Origins of food crops connect countries worldwide. Proc. R. Soc. B 283: 20160792. Available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2016.0792

About the circular plots

The circular plots link the "primary regions of diversity" of crops (regions where crops were initially domesticated and evolved over long periods of time, and where the diversity of traditional crop varieties and related wild plants is especially high) with crops' current importance in regional food supplies, measured in terms of calories (kcal/capita/day), protein (g/capita/day), fat (g/capita/day), and food weight (g/capita/day), and in regional agricultural production, measured in terms of total production quantity (tonnes), harvested area (ha), and gross production value (current million US$).

Each region has a color representing its own "native" crops and those colors are connected to other regions due the importance of those crops in the diets/agricultural production in other regions. The direction of the contribution is indicated by both the "native" region's color and a gap between the connecting line and the consuming/producing region's segment. The magnitude of contribution is indicated by the width of the connecting line. Because the line width is nonlinearly adapted to the curvature, it corresponds to the contribution size only at the start and end points. Regional food supply values (per capita/day) were formed by deriving a weighted average of national food supply values across countries comprising each region, with national values weighted by population. Regional production values were formed by summing national production values across countries comprising each region.

Methods and code for the plots were derived from The Global Flow of People by Nikola Sander, Guy J. Abel and Ramon Bauer at the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital. Their human migration source code and our source code are both available on Github.

About the data

We analyzed the full set of food crop commodities reported in national food supply and pertinent national production data provided by FAO (1) [for food supplies- calories (kcal/capita/day), protein (g/capita/day), fat (g/capita/day), and food weight (g/capita/day); for production systems- production quantity (tonnes), harvested area (ha), and gross production value (current million US$). National food supply from plants represents national production plus imports plus or minus food reserve changes over the survey period; minus exports, quantities used for seed, animal feed, and in the manufacture of non-food products, and losses during storage and transport. While food supply data accounts for direct human consumption, production data for crops such as maize and soybean are potentially inclusive of livestock and industrial uses as well as human food. In the production analysis we also included agricultural crops indirectly contributing to human food supplies via livestock production (i.e., alfalfa, clover, and vetch). Non-food (e.g., fibre for clothing) crops as well as animal product commodities were not included in the analysis. Plant commodities comprised of the same crop species were aggregated into single commodities representing the crop, e.g., sesame seed oil and sesame seed. After aggregation, 53 crop commodities remained in food supplies data, and 132 crop commodities in production data.

We analyzed data for each crop commodity per country per measurement over the most recent three years for which sufficient data were available (2009-2011). All (177) countries consistently reported during the time period were included for food supplies variables, as well as for production quantity and harvested area, covering 98.5% of the world's population. All (141) countries reported for (current million US$) production value were included, covering 94.1% of the world's population.

Regions were delineated following national borders in order to form manageable units for the assignment of primary regions of diversity of all crops, and at a scale enabling comparison with national food supply and production data. Regional classifications followed those listed in Annex 2 of the FAO State of the World's Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (2), modified to more accurately represent eco-geographic parameters driving plant species distributions. Specifically, both western and eastern Europe were split into north and south regions to account for cold temperate versus Mediterranean ecologies; Australia and New Zealand were segregated from the remaining (tropical) islands of the Pacific region; and South America was split into Andean, temperate, and tropical regions. A total of 23 regions were delineated worldwide. To account for eco-geographic variation within countries, those countries whose boundaries included more than one region were included in all appropriate regions (e.g., Colombia was assigned both to Andean and to tropical South American regions). See the countries-regions table for a listing of all countries and their associated eco-geographic regions.

Primary regions of diversity were assigned to crops based on published studies regarding origins and centres of crop diversity and species richness of closely related wild plants (3-18). The primary region of diversity unit was chosen for this analysis due to its greater overall applicability across the literature in comparison to more precisely proposed centres of origin or centres of diversity. To be inclusive with regard to primary regions of diversity of crops, those crops whose primary diversity encompassed more than one designated region were listed in all appropriate regions (e.g., wheat was listed in Central Asia, West Asia, and the South and East Mediterranean due to the high diversity of traditional crop varieties and wild relatives in each of these regions). Forty-two of the total 53 crop commodities treated in food supplies data, and 116 of the total 132 crops in production data were attributable to primary regions of diversity. The remaining commodities that were not clearly recognizable as specific crop species (e.g., "Fruits, other") were listed as "not specified". See the crops-regions table for a listing of all crops and their primary regions of diversity. The crop map displays primary regions of diversity for selected major agricultural crops.

For each country, we determined the importance of each primary region of diversity around the world to its national food supply and national production by summing the contribution of consumed/produced crops by their primary regions of diversity. Country level information on the importance of primary regions of diversity is available for download for both national food supplies and national production systems. The circular plots display this data, with consuming/producing countries aggregated to the regional level.
References

1. FAO. 2015 FAOSTAT. Rome, Italy: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Available at http://faostat3.fao.org/.

2. FAO. 2010 Second Report on the State of the World's Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. Rome, Italy: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

3. Harlan JR. 1951 Anatomy of Gene Centers. American Naturalist 8 (821), 97-103.

4. Zhukovsky PM. 1965 Main gene centres of cultivated plants and their wild relatives within the territory of the U.S.S.R. Euphytica 14, 177-188.

5. Sinskaya EN. 1969 Historical geography of cultivated floras (at the dawn of agriculture). Kolos, Leningrad, USSR.

6. Zhukovsky PM. 1968 New centres of origin and new gene centres of cultivated plants including specifically endemic microcentres of species closely allied to cultivated species. Bot. J. (Russian Bot Z.) 53, 430-460.

7. Harlan JR. 1971 Agricultural origins: centres and noncentres, Science 174, 468-474.

8. Harlan JR. 1975 Crops and Man. Madison, WI: American Society of Agronomy and Crop Science Society of America.

9. Zeven AC, Zhukovsky P. 1975 Dictionary of Cultivated Plants and Their Centres of Diversity: Excluding Most Ornamentals, Forest Trees and Lower Plants. Wageningen, Netherlands: CAPD.

10. Zeven AC, De Wet JMJ. 1982 Dictionary of Cultivated Plants and Their Regions of Diversity: Excluding Most Ornamentals, Forest Trees and Lower Plants Wageningen, Netherlands: CAPD.

11. Hawkes JG. 1983 The diversity of crop plants. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

12. Flores-Palacios X. 1998 Contribution to the Estimation of Countries' Interdependence in the Area of Plant Genetic Resources. Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, Background Study Paper No. 7, Rev. 1. Rome, Italy: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Rome.

13. Engels J, Hodgkin T, Thormann I, Robinson J, Fowler C. 2001 Crops Proposed for the Multilateral System: Centres of Diversity, Locations of Ex Situ Collections, and Major Producing Countries. Background Study Paper No. 12 (CGRFA/CG-4/00/Inf.4) of the Fourth Inter-Sessional Meeting of the Contact Group of the CGRFA Secretariat. Rome, Italy: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

14. Hanelt P, Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research. 2001 Mansfeld's Encyclopedia of Agricultural and Horticultural Crops. Berlin: Springer.

15. Vincent H, Wiersema J, Kell S, Fielder H, Dobbie S, Castañeda-Álvarez NP, Guarino L, Eastwood R, León B, Maxted N. 2013 A prioritized crop wild relative inventory to help underpin global food security. Biol. Conserv. 167, 265-75.

16. GRIN (Germplasm Resources Information Network). 2014 GRIN. Beltsville, MD: USDA, ARS, National Genetic Resources Program (accessed 1 July 2014). Available at https://npgsweb.ars-grin.gov/gringlobal/taxon/taxonomysearch.aspx.

17. Prota (Plant Resources of Tropical Africa). 2014 Prota4u online database (accessed 1 July 2014). Available at http://www.prota4u.info/.

18. Castañeda-Álvarez NP, Khoury CK, Achicanoy H, Bernau V, Dempewolf H, Eastwood RJ, Guarino L, Harker RH, Jarvis A, Maxted N, Mueller JV, Ramírez-Villegas J, Sosa CC, Struik PC, Vincent H, Toll J. 2016 Global conservation priorities for crop wild relatives. Nature Plants 2(4): 16022.

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by Colin K. Khoury, Harold A. Achicanoy, Carlos Navarro-Racines, Steven Sotelo, and Andy Jarvis at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT). Version 1.0 (May 2016). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International ( CC BY 4.0).

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When you think of the world, the Mercator projection is probably the map that comes to mind. It's everywhere: atlases, school walls, even Google Maps. It's also, very, very wrong, and it's been distorting our view of the world for centuries.

It's one of the most common projections used for world maps. Gerardus Mercator created it in 1569 to help with ship navigation. The map was revolutionary because it straightened both lines of latitude and longitude, which was great for sailors; all you had to do was draw a line to where you wanted to go on the map and follow your compass.

But to make a navigation-friendly map, the projection distorts landmasses the closer they are to the poles, giving us the wrong idea about the relative size of - and maybe even the importance of - some regions.

This creates what some mapmakers call "the Greenland Problem."

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Greenland on Mercator's map is huge; it's bigger than the entire continent of South America. The same thing happens with Alaska. Using Mercator's projection, the state looks bigger than the entire country of Mexico. The farther land is from the equator on a Mercator map, the more stretched out it is. In reality, South America is eight times the size of Greenland, and Mexico is actually bigger than Alaska.

For the same reason, 2,000 miles on a Mercator map looks much different when it's measured near Central America versus when it's measured by Iceland. The fault is in the map.

This happens because mapmakers must rely on mathematical formulas to project the surface of the Earth, a sphere, onto the surface on a map, a plane. Calculus and complex algebra eventually improved map projections, yet the Mercator stubbornly remained a popular general world map.

Although it was a great navigation map, it was also used as a geographic map in classrooms and in atlases. The distorted view of Earth's landmasses in a Mercator's projection became how people saw the world.

Mapmakers and geographers weren't happy.

Everything started to change in the mid-20th century. There was a world war, and more airplanes were being used than ever before.

Editorials published in The New York Times in the '40s called for the Mercator to be discarded and reminded readers "the grossness of its errors should not be forgotten." In a series of orthographic maps in 1942 and '43, Fortune magazine declared the "Mercator is no map for global war" and that it was "a dangerous map to use in studying global strategy." A exposé on cartography published in Life magazine around the same time called the Mercator a "mental hazard in a war that is plotted on great circles across the land and sea and through the air."

Perhaps nowhere was the rejection of Mercator's projection more apparent than with Richard Edes Harrison's illustrations. The architect-turned-illustrator for Fortune magazine created maps truly fit for a world dominated by flight, offering revolutionary views of the planet as World War II raged. In Harrison's maps, it was clear just how obvious United States isolation was - or how many neighbors Europe had.

Maps were taking on a new use: persuasion.

Suddenly, maps became a convenient way to show just how threatening Germany's neighbor Czechoslovakia was (when it really wasn't) or how imperative it was to fight communism, or how threatening other countries were to the USSR. A transverse oblique homolographic map does wonders for showing how close, and how threatening, the USSR really was in this Times Atlas map.

Eventually, a German historian created what he said was a revolutionary map projection he marketed as the solution to the Mercator. For Arno Peters, the Mercator represented Western imperialism. His new projection, with a more prominent Africa and South America, was meant to emphasize what he called the "Third World." Reactions ranged from cautious amusement to outright hostility. Peters had trashed the cartographic community in writings promoting his map - and his version wasn't even original; a Scottish clergyman named James Gall created virtually the same thing in 1885.

Eventually, the American Congress on Surveying and Mapping stepped in and had a resolution. The organization and six other cartographic groups urged map publishers, the media and government agencies to stop using rectangular depictions like the Gall-Peters and Mercator for general purposes. The answer to Mercator's problem was not a new rectangular map, the resolution said, but instead non-rectangular projections like the Mollweide or Eckert IV.

The media picked up the resolution, including a column in The Washington Post. It even made it to the front page of The Wall Street Journal.

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The Gall-Peters hasn't gone away. Boston Public Schools recently said it will now use the Gall-Peters in classrooms to "de-colonize" the curriculum. But it's not like the Gall-Peters is replacing all maps. You can find different types everywhere. The U.N. logo has an azimuthal projection, and a Goode homolosine is in the background of CBS' evening news broadcast. But if you're really worried about how to look at the world, you should probably just buy a globe.
If you're interested in more really cool maps, check out the two great collections we sampled for this video. The first is the Another great resource is A couple useful resources for figuring out the actual sizes of countries or continents include James Talmage and Damon Maneice's "The True Size Of ..." app. It lets you see how the Mercator projection distorts landmasses. The "MapFight" app compares the landmass of two geographic areas. Cornell University's PJ Mode Collection of persuasive maps, which has 800-plus digitized maps that were intended to influence beliefs. David Rumsey Map Collection, which has thousands of digitized versions. Mercator, Mollweide, Goode homolosine - this collection has it all.

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When you think of the world, the Mercator projection is probably the map that comes to mind. It's everywhere: atlases, school walls, even Google Maps. It's also, very, very wrong, and it's been distorting our view of the world for centuries. It's one of the most common projections used for world maps.

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Introduction to AP* Human Geography | UTAustinX on edX | Course About Video

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The ultimate map quiz site! Seterra will challenge you with quizzes about countries, capitals, flags, oceans, lakes and more! Introduced in 1997 and available in more than 40 different languages, Seterra has helped millions of people study geography and learn about their world.

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