Spatial Reserves

As this blog and our book is all about GIS, data, and society, we frequently discuss what areas are mapped, and what areas are NOT mapped with specific tools. Chris The Producer recently set out to map a missing city from Google Street View. His thesis statement included: “Google Maps is one of the most insane projects humans have ever pulled off. Cars, satellites, planes, billions of photos… basically the entire planet, stitched together so you can drop a little yellow pegman guy anywhere and look around. Except for one place… North Oaks, Minnesota.”

As a part of Chris’ quest, I was happy to chat with him. What I didn’t expect is for me to get the title of “The Biggest Map Nerd in the World” in Chris’ video, which was indeed a great honor! I’m not sure if I qualify, but I was glad to be a part of this important conversation!

More importantly, I encourage you to watch Chris’ video, which is here:
https://youtu.be/gtiiHXsnsrY?si=s9cKb9BIHKGD3tsB

After you watch the video, aligned with the themes of what is included and what is left off of maps, and about location privacy, read the following line of text and then the following short entries:

• UAV imagery off a Tower in San Francisco.

• Teaching Location Privacy with a Big Pixel Image.

• Location Privacy while shopping at physical stores.

• Shining a Torch on Location Privacy.

As a 21st Century human, Google Maps is probably one of your most frequently used tools. I use it all the time as well! I use it, as you probably do as well, to measure hiking, biking, or driving distances, to find out what the turning intersections look like, to find local businesses, or my way across campus. I use it to plan new places to explore. I used it this month to determine what the office building looked like from the front where I would be teaching a GIS course.

As a geographer and educator, I also use Google Maps extensively. With its street and imagery basemaps, and the billions of images in its Street View (along with the trails and river views in the same tool), Google Maps and Street View is one of my all time favorite instructional tools. I use it to teach about physical regions (grasslands, lava, deserts, tropical rainforests, etc, physical processes (including climate and weather, rivers, coastal processes, and more), business types and locations, economic health and stagnation, and cultural regions and processes (language, housing type, population change, left-vs-right hand driving, urban forms, agricultural practice and crop type), and much more. I teach some of these same themes in 3D with Google Earth.

However, there are concerns with any mapping tools. Mapping has always been a value-laden enterprise, with many ethical decisions that must be made along the way (which we also discuss in this blog; search the blog for “ethics” for example). With all of this in mind, watching the above video and reading the above texts will provide many fruitful points of discussion with students and colleagues with which you interact, either in formal class settings or during informal chats. Questions you could raise could include:

• Do you think North Oaks Minnesota had a legitimate reasons for not wanting to be covered by the Street View imagery? Do you think it had the legal right not to be covered?
• In our book, published 2012, we noted that most of Germany had successfully blocked Google Street View up to that time. At a small scale, pull up Google Maps, set the scale so that you are looking at all of central Europe at once, and click on the Street View icon. Observe Germany. Is Germany still largely uncovered by Google Street View as we reported in 2012, or has the situation changed?
• What countries in Europe, if any, are still largely uncovered by Google Street View images? At the time of this writing, Belarus seems notably devoid of Google Street View images. Which countries in Asia, Africa, and South America are noticeably absent in these images? Note that Australia has many Street View images, but the interior is lacking–name one reason why this might be the case.
• What if a person wanted to blur their residence in Google Street View? See my recent essay on this topic, here: Blurring of residences in Google Street View.
• While still in Google Street View > search and find North Oaks, Minnesota, which is the subject of Chris’ video. What is the Street View coverage there today?
• In the video, Chris describes how he obtains a UAV license and flies a UAV in the community. With tools such as Drone2Map, SiteScan, and Pix4D, it has become fairly straightforward to bring UAV imagery into a GIS. How is do-it-yourself imagery via UAVs (Drones) becoming a key part of GIS workflows and geotechnologies? See some of our essays on this topic here. On the education side, most community college and university remote sensing/GIS programs include at least one course dedicated to UAVs, and if not, include it in their existing remote sensing courses. Even some secondary schools I work with include this type of imagery in their courses, and a few even fly their own imagery.
• Perhaps most importantly, who decides what gets mapped?  The crowdsourcing mapping movement, of which Chris provides a good example of, involves ordinary people creating useful mapping content.  One of the earliest examples of mapping making a difference is in the Darfur situation in Chad and Sudan.  Other examples include the ones we describe in this blog, including iNaturalist, OpenStreetMap, and probably the most famous of all, when local people mapped the Kibera neighborhood in Kenya, the government began to take action to supply the community with much needed infrastructure, sanitation, schools, and much else. 

Read and reflect upon the above points and stories and consider that: Mapping is never just about putting things on a map, it is about understanding our world and making positive changes happen in our world, from the global scale to our own communities.

I look forward to your reactions,

–Joseph Kerski

We have been discussing location privacy starting back in 2012 (with a “shining a torch” post here: https://spatialreserves.wordpress.com/2012/06/23/shining-a-torch-on-location-privacy/), and a discussion on big pixel images here (https://spatialreserves.wordpress.com/2019/10/13/teaching-location-privacy-and-resolution-with-a-big-pixel-image/), and more recently from an amazing set of UAV imagery off of a tower in San Francisco (https://spatialreserves.wordpress.com/2025/11/03/a-uav-produced-3d-model-of-sutro-tower-in-san-francisco/). Spanning the years of our posts on this subject, the blurring of faces from various sensor platforms has become commonplace, whether in webcams, Google Street Views, and across other platforms.

License plates, address numbers, and sometimes, even the image of a particular residence in Google Street View and in other tools are often blurred. Your location matters, and it matters to many organizations. Let’s think about other things that can be tied to your own location, starting with the “license plate list” above. Hence the concern and the built-in blurring of many of these items in commonly-used platforms has become commonplace.

But such blurring is by no means ubiquitous. Why not?

I use Google Street View frequently to teach about cultural and physical geography quite often and in my opinions it is one of the most amazing resources ever created. Its billions of photos can be used to teach and learn about language, housing type, plant species, biomes and ecoregions, coastal and glacial processes, land ownership, land use, land cover, age and income, weather and climate, and much more. In other words, much more than in turn-by-turn directions and what the building your final destination is will look like.

Returning to our location privacy discussion: Things to think about: Is your own residence blurred? Do you care if it is? Is your face blurred in webcams and other sensor platforms? How could you check? Is this issue of concern to you?

An example of a blurred residence that I found is below:

An residence blurred in Google Street View.

One of my colleagues sent me a step-by-step guide for blurring your own residence in Google Maps, below. This can be done at the owner’s request and apparently is a permanent action that cannot be reversed (hence, caution is advised–what are the pros and cons of blurring of your own residence?).

Step-by-step guide for blurring your own residence in Google Maps: Below. Or, start directly here: https://support.google.com/maps/answer/15439776?hl=en-GB

    1    Go to Google Maps: Open Google Maps in your web browser (PC/Mac or mobile).
    2    Find your home: Search for your address and click the Street View image (the little photo icon) that appears.
    3    Report a problem: In the bottom-right corner of the Street View image, click the tiny text that says “Report a problem“. (On mobile, you might need to tap the three dots first).
    4    Adjust the blur area: Use your mouse to move the image so your house is centered in the red box. Use the + and – buttons to zoom in or out for a precise fit.
    5    Fill out the form:
    ◦    Select “My home” as the request type.
    ◦    Provide your email address (required for confirmation).
    ◦    Briefly explain the area to blur in the description box.
    6    Submit: Click Submit. Google will review the request and blur the image permanently. 

Important notes:

    •    Permanent: The blur is irreversible once applied.
    •    Owner/Tenant: Only homeowners or tenants can request a house blur.
    •    Not the app: Use a web browser, not the dedicated mobile app, for the best experience. 

I would be interested to hear your reactions about these issues.

–Joseph Kerski

I have been intrigued with my experiments with the SparkMap tool from the University of Missouri, and after speaking with their wonderful developer team, they graciously agreed to write the following description of their tools and data. One of my favorite tools is selecting one of the layers and easily exporting a CSV from that layer; another is the Community Demographic Mapping and Reporting tools.

SparkMap (www.sparkmap.org) is an online data tool featuring a robust Map Room and Community Needs Assessment tool. Built using Esri technologies, the SparkMap Map Room (https://sparkmap.org/map-room/) provides provides public access to over 28,000+ data layers for the USA from over 100 national secondary sources such as the U.S. Census Bureau, CDC, and Bureau of Labor Statistics. To create a map, choose a data layer (or a few!), zoom into locations of interest, and filter data down to geography levels of interest. The SparkMap Map Room is also equipped with a suite of tools to extract additional data from maps — notable examples include the Download Data Tool, the Query Data Tool, and the Vulnerable Populations Footprint Tool. The Community Needs Assessment provides much of the same information in the Map Room, in a table- and graph-based format. If you have any questions as you’re exploring the tools, the team at SparkMap is always happy to provide support and can be reached at sparkmap@missouri.org. 

SparkMap is supported by the University of Missouri’s Center for Applied Research and Engagement Systems (CARES). Founded in 1992, CARES has over 30 years of experience developing mapping systems to help make data accessible and actionable for public and organizational education and decision-making. Our mission is to integrate data across socio-economic, environmental, business, and health domains to support education and research across the United States.

Capacity index and average annual temperature.

Using the feature extraction tool.

Using the community assessment tool.

SparkMap offers free, intro, Pro, Premium, and Enterprise subscription packages. There is also a SparkMap API!

I look forward to your reactions and salute the development team at SparkMap.

–Joseph Kerski

My colleague Megan Engel GISP has written some very sound advice on keeping your GIS data organized, that I thought would be especially useful for the readers of this Spatial Reserves data blog, and with Megan’s permission, I am sharing it here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-i-keep-my-gis-data-mostly-organized-megan-engel-gisp-cthme/

Megan’s points include documentation and tracking and listing sources, writing something about every data set you use, even if it is just a sentence. I also like Megan’s advice, “And lastly… When it comes to data, TRUST NO ONE👻. Without proper documentation or clear metadata, you can’t assume anything about a dataset. Your map is only as reliable as the information it’s built on. Sometimes the only person who can verify it… is you.”

As this data blog makes clear, with the advent of web GIS tools, servers, and web mapping applications, increasingly, some of “your” data (“your” in quotes here because you use it, but you might not have authored or own it) is in a combination of places, such as–

• on your own device that you use daily.
• on your own hard drives that are near to the device you use daily.
• on media that are increasingly difficult for you to access, but you ‘might need it someday’ such as on ancient hard drives that you bought long ago or on CD-ROM or DVD
• on file sharing services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Box.com, and so on.
• attached to sharing and meeting software such as Teams and Sharepoint.
• in your own cloud GIS storage such as ArcGIS Online.
• in someone else’s GIS cloud storage, such as data you are consuming that others own.
• on a server somewhere in your office or organization.
• on a government, nonprofit, or industry hub site, library, or server.
• on computer systems in the cloud that you rent time on such as Microsoft Planetary computer.
• … and other places you could probably name.

Because of these many locations, being organized is more critical than ever!

I always say in the courses and workshops I teach, that GIS is a system, and is complicated enough on its own, so don’t things more difficult for yourself by not being organized.

I look forward to your reactions,

—Joseph Kerski

This Landsat Surface Temperature Web Mapping Application and data could be very useful in physical geography, environmental science, and GIS courses in instruction, and for research purposes:

From this application, you can obtain the land or water surface temperature as of the time the Landsat image was generated for any point on the planet, generate a surface profile to look at change over time, use Landsat scenes stretching back to the 1970s, and then use additional maps and data to compare the surface temperature to the air temperature, analyzing the reasons for the differences.  The same data is available as image services in ArcGIS Online and in ArcGIS Pro, too, for further analysis.

Below I show the dynamic function and the profile function in the application. I think this touches on a trend we have highlighted in this blog recently–it is not just data that is being served these days, it is actionable information. It also touches on the increasing global scope of many data sources. It also touches on what I am calling “smart data sets”–the applications allow the user to select the most pertinent data sets for their needs right inside the application, without the need for further processing. The user could, of course, use the data in ArcGIS Pro or another GIS toolset for additional information or projections, but right away in this application, is something useful without doing so.

I look forward to hearing your reactions.

–Joseph Kerski