| Montreal, 20/02/2008 – A new online information tool from the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) provides a suite of materials that allows users to visualize significant North American environmental issues at a continental scale.
The North American Environmental Atlas, which brings together maps, data, interactive map layers, and links to other related materials, is available at: http://www.cec.org/naatlas.
This site builds on the work of CEC’s National Atlas partners—Natural Resources Canada; Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics, Geography, and Informatics; and the US Geological Survey—to create harmonized base map layers of North America. These base layers of political boundaries, populated places, roads and railroads, coastlines, lakes and rivers, and other geographic features offer a consistent North American mapping framework for future cooperation.
To this framework, the CEC has added thematic map layers for priority conservation areas, renewable energy capacity, and other environmental topics. The atlas also features the CEC’s terrestrial ecological regions of North America. New map layers, including protected areas, marine ecoregions, and land cover, are currently under development and will be added to the North American Environmental Atlas in the coming months.
The CEC is also exploring innovative mapping and information access methods, including the industrial pollutant map layer <http://www.cec.org/naatlas/prtr/> recently released for use with Google Earth.
Do you have a map layer that the CEC should add to the North American Environmental Atlas? Have you used CEC mapping resources in your projects? We would love to hear from you. Please send examples or other information to: info@cec.org.
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