Prof. Robert Hartwell (1932 - 1996) created his China Historical GIS under the auspices of his company Chinese Historical Studies. His estate left the data to Harvard University. These materials include functional GIS datasets for the Chinese Dynasties, from Tang to Ming, which were based on the concept of "co-location," or the use of GIS representations of modern county-level administrative units as building blocks to depict the approximate shapes of historical areas. Making use of county boundary data for 1992, (obtained from Crissman's ACASIAN data), Hartwell represented historical units that occupied roughly the same areas by merging or splitting the 1992 counties. Where the contemporary boundaries could not be "co-located" in this fashion, Hartwell drew in approximate line boundaries to divide the contemporary units to fit the historical situations and therefore provide an approximation of the historical unit's area. Although the resulting boundaries are, in many cases, problematic representations, the GIS remains an interesting hueristic GIS tool for sorting, querying, and creating digital maps for selected areas within the major dynasties up to the Ming. Harvard University released the original Hartwell datasets on April 2nd, 2001, in conjunction with the CHGIS project, as a useful means of generating approximate spatial entities correlating to historical administrative units. For Version 5, the Hartwell Datasets were renamed according to a filenaming convention (described above) and projected to match the CHGIS V5 standard (2014).

Wildlands in New England is the first U.S. study to map and characterize within one region all conserved lands that, by design, allow natural processes to unfold with no active management or intervention. These “forever wild lands” include federal Wilderness areas along with diverse public and private natural areas and reserves. Knowing the precise locations of Wildlands, their characteristics, and their protection status is important as both a baseline for advancing conservation initiatives and an urgent call to action for supporting nature and society. Wildlands play a unique role in the integrated approach to conservation and land planning advanced by the Wildlands, Woodlands, Farmlands & Communities (WWF&C) initiative, which calls for: at least 70 percent of the region to be protected forest; Wildlands to occupy at least 10 percent of the land; and all existing farmland to be permanently conserved. This research was conducted by WWF&C partners Harvard Forest (Harvard University), Highstead Foundation, and Northeast Wilderness Trust, in collaboration with over one hundred conservation organizations and municipal, state, and federal agencies. This dataset contains the Geographical Information System (GIS) polygon layer of Wildlands created by this project and used in all analyses for the 2023 report. Another GIS layer will be updated as new Wildlands are brought to our attention or created and will be available at https://wildlandsandwoodlands.org/ for researchers.

Take a looks at the Harvard Map Collection's interactive exhibit 'Embellishing the Map,' which explores the myriad varieties and uses of embellishments found on the library's extraordinary collection of maps.This exhibition presents maps chosen from the Harvard Map Collection that display how European cartographers, mainly from the Low Countries of the 16th and 17th centuries, embellished maps with a variety of illustrative, non-cartographic elements. With echoes of the classical world’s anxiety of the “horror vacuii” (fear of empty spaces), the uncharted and unknown spaces are populated with sea creatures and animals, from the mythic and fantastic to the zoologically accurate, and many varieties of ships plying the open seas. All in their natural habitat, which is to say located on the land and seas of the map, not as artistic embellishments in cartouches or title panels (something for another exhibition, perhaps). The sources for the cartographic fauna run the gamut from classical sources (the histories of Herodotus and Pliny the Elder), Medieval bestiaries and compendiums of the natural world (Hortus Sanitatis), to accounts from the ever peripatetic explorers. The maps are presented in loosely geographic order, beginning (where everything begins) with the heavens, then, after a medieval view of the known world, moves from the Western Hemisphere eastward to the Pacific Ocean. Besides the few modern, more thematic maps that have been included for contrast, chronologically this exhibition effectively ends before the ascendancy of the Royally sponsored French cartographers of the 18th century. The maps of Delisle, Bellin, d’Anville and the distinguished Cassini dynasty migrate the sea creatures, animals and ships to the pages and articles of Diederot’s grand Encyclopedia. What now is presented on the map reflects the science of cartography and measurement reigning supreme, not alas (as seen in the 1541 map “Tabula noua partis Africae”), a King riding a bridled Sea Carp!

Funded by a grant from the Sloan Foundation, and with support from Massachusetts Open Cloud, the Center for Geographic Analysis(CGA) at Harvard developed a “big geodata”, remotely hosted, real-time-updated dataset which is a prototype for a new data type hosted outside Dataverse which supports streaming updates, and is accessed via an API. The CGA developed 1) the software and hardware platform to support interactive exploration of a billion spatio-temporal objects, nicknamed the "BOP" (billion object platform) 2) an API to provide query access to the archive from Dataverse 3) client-side tools for querying/visualizing the contents of the archive and extracting data subsets. This project is currently no longer active. For more information please see: http://gis.harvard.edu/services/project-consultation/project-resume/billion-object-platform-bop. “Geotweets” are tweets containing a GPS coordinate from the originating device. Currently 1-2% of tweets are geotweets, about 8 million per day. The CGA has been harvesting geotweets since 2012.

Harvard CGA 2018 Datafest Presentation on Dataverse and WorldMap

AfricaMap is housed at the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard University with an initial grant from the Harvard Provosts Fund for Innovative Computing and ongoing support from the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute, the Department of African and African American Studies and the Committee for African Studies at Harvard University. AfricaMap grew out of a project, called Baobab, funded by the Seaver Institute.AfricaMap is powered by World Map. WorldMap allows anyone to:Upload layers overlay them with thousands of other layersCreate and edit maps and link map features to media contentPublish data to the world or to just a few collaboratorsExport data to standard interoperable formatsMake use of online cartographic tools for symbolizing layersGeoreference paper maps online using the Map Warper Tool

Since 1908, the Harvard Forest has conducted forest surveys approximately every 10-20 years on its three largest tracts (total 1033 ha). These maps have been digitized along with maps of environmental factors (topography, soils), disturbance (1938 hurricane, historical land-use), and silvicultural treatments. These datalayers will allow researchers to understand the influence of environment factors, disturbances, and silviculture on the structure and composition of modern forest stands as well as assisting in locating and describing research sites. The dataset also includes an elevation grid (NED 30 meter cells), and a shapefile of linear features (trails, stonewalls, etc). Original maps were transcribed to standardized basemaps by various researchers. These basemaps were then scanned and digitized as shapefiles in ArcView GIS 3.2. The shapefiles were then transformed to Massachusetts State Plane Meters NAD83 projection in ArcGIS and rubbersheeted to align better with aerial photographs downloaded from MassGIS. Locations of control points will be permanently archived at the Harvard Forest to facilitate transformation of future datalayers.

These data sets were created as part of The Center for International Development’s ongoing research into the role of geography in economic development (see www.cid.harvard.edu/economic.htm). They have been created between 1998 and 1999.

The First International Workshop on Historical GIS was held on Aug 23rd - 24th, 2001 at Fudan University, Shanghai, China. The Workshop was hosted by the Center for Historical Geographical Studies at Fudan, and organized by: Jianxiong GE (Fudan University), Peter Bol (Harvard University), Ruth Mostern (U.C. Berkeley) , and Lex Berman (Harvard University). RELATED WEBSITE: https://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~chgis/pages/agendas/shanghai_2001.html

The GIS data maintained by HPPM includes information on buildings and grounds related to Harvard University. Our "standard" base layers are available to Harvard affiliates and their service providers (for example, architects) working on Harvard projects in AutoCAD DWG, ESRI SHP or File Geodatabase format. Additional datasets are sometimes available by special arrangement. http://home.hppm.harvard.edu/pages/gis-data-layers

This dataset contains elevation, 1986 forest type, land-use history, and soils maps for the Prospect Hill Tract, digitized from paper maps in the Harvard Forest Archives. File format = Idrisi 4.1 binary. Resolution = 10m x 10m. Coordinates = UTM zone 18. Datum = 1927 North American. This dataset has been replaced with a new vector series for the entire Harvard Forest (see HF110).

This dataset provides global maps of mean values and standard deviations of five soil hydraulic parameters based on Kosugi water retention model in 1 km resolution for surface soils (0-5cm). Calculations are estimated from Kosugi K3 pedotransfer function model (using sand, silt, clay percentage, and bulk density as input) based on the surface soil of SoilGrids 1 km data set (Hengl et al., 2014). The dataset is in GeoTIFF format, which can be read by R, python, Matlab, etc, and most GIS software. If you use the dataset, please cite our publication ^_^ . Yonggen Zhang, Marcel G. Schaap, and Yuanyuan Zha. (2018). A High-Resolution Global Map of Soil Hydraulic Properties Produced by a Hierarchical Parameterization of a Physically-Based Water Retention Model, Water Resources Research, 54. https://doi.org/10.1029/2018WR023539

StoryMap theme consistent with Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health Communications standards

GIS Layers used to create the hunting habitat model, which include Cattle density, Distance from edge, Dominant landcover, Forest edge density, Forest patch size, Improved pasture patch size, Landcover, and Percent forest cover. Area of analysis defined by Minimum Convex Polygons created from Florida panther GPS data.

GIS-based language maps, showing distribution of polygons based on centroid for each language by group.

This feature layer is part of SDGs Today. Please see sdgstoday.orgPromoting well-being is one of the key targets of Sustainable Development Goals at the United Nations. Many governments worldwide are incorporating subjective well-being (SWB) indicators to complement traditional objective and economic metrics. Our Twitter Sentiment Geographical Index (TSGI) can provide a high granularity monitor of well-being worldwide.This dataset is a joint effort of the Sustainable Urbanization Lab at MIT and Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard.

The datasets presented here enable historical longitudinal studies of micro-level geographic factors in a rural setting. These types of datasets are new, as historical demography studies have generally failed to properly include the micro-level geographic factors. Our datasets describe the geography over five Swedish rural parishes and a geocoded population (at the property unit level) for this area for the time period 1813-1914. The population is a subset of the Scanian Economic Demographic Database (SEDD). The geographic information includes the following feature types: property units, wetlands, buildings, roads and railroads. The property units and wetlands are stored in object-lifeline time representations (information about creation, changes and ends of objects are recorded in time), whereas the other feature types are stored as snapshots in time. Thus, the datasets present one of the first opportunities to study historical spatio-temporal patterns at the micro-level.

The historical GIS layers for the Tokugawa Period (circa 1664 and 1820) were developed for presentation at CEAL, Japanese Librarians Meeting, 2004. This paper will briefly outline existing examples of Japan Historical GIS, the methodology used to develop our demonstration GIS, and the means of searching the data online.

Updated Prefecture Polygons now have mostly complete spatial coverage for the Dynastic administrative units from 1350 - 1911 CE. Prefectures from earlier periods, 221 BCE to 1350 CE, still have gaps in spatial coverage.

GIS Layers used to create the Florida panther hunting habitat model, which include Cattle density, Distance from edge, Dominant landcover, Forest edge density, Forest patch size, Improved pasture patch size, Landcover, and Percent forest cover. Area of analysis defined by Minimum Convex Polygons created from Florida panther GPS telemetry data.