NACIS 2026

Should I stay or should I go? Encouraging early bushfire evacuation through fire spread prediction maps
Amy Griffin, RMIT University
Chloe Begg, Country Fire Authority
Matt Blanc, RMIT University
Erica Kuligowski, RMIT University
Paula Dootson, QUT University
Angela Gardner, Victorian Department of Education
Bushfire is a significant hazard in Australia, affecting much of the population. A policy of shared responsibility for protective action decision making between the government and residents means bushfire maps are a critical input into decision making. This presentation reports on the findings of a series of studies with end users that tested the efficacy and comprehensibility of bushfire spread predictions that were added to traditional bushfire warning maps in a simulated fire scenario. It reflects on the role of maps in the wider information ecosystem that residents use to understand emergency situations and the complexities of communicating what is known in situations that are often highly uncertain.

Reimagining Heat: An experimental mapping of the Los Angeles heatscape
Arfa Momin, University of California, Berkeley
Advised by Clancy Wilmott (Assistant Professor in Critical Cartography at Berkeley Centre for New Media and Department of Geography)
Heat is woven into many disciplines—climate, energy, public health, ecology—and its effects are felt globally. Yet despite (and perhaps because) of this reach, heat is often overlooked in critical geographic conversations. Heat is not simply a fixed reading on a thermometer, but something relational, emerging from encounters between atmospheres, bodies, and social circumstances. Conventional maps show where heat is, but not how it is produced, distributed and lived asymmetrically. This project asks what it would mean to make a map that reveals as heat does. Using Los Angeles as a case study, I’ll present a digital 3D cartographic tool to visualize the unevenness of heat while attempting to push the representational limits of mapping itself.
(Link to project: reimagine-heat.com)

From Mandates to Maps: Leveraging GIS and Web Mapping to Communicate Locally Relevant Climate Risks and Inform Climate Change Adaptation
Jonnell Robinson, Syracuse University
GIS-based spatial analysis and web mapping offer powerful tools for communicating climate hazards and risks to residents, planners, and policymakers. This presentation will demonstrate how we leveraged ArcGIS Online and StoryMaps to support the City of Syracuse’s Climate Vulnerability Assessment for New York State’s Climate Smart Communities Program. We used GIS to visualize climate data, historical weather events, community assets, and vulnerable people and places to aid the city’s efforts to publicly communicate locally relevant climate change risks, including increased extreme weather events, flooding, and heat. The maps reveal uneven geographies of climate risk vulnerability, such as flood-prone neighborhoods, aging infrastructure, and socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods and present opportunities to empower residents and inform place-based policy interventions at the local scale.

City and County of Denver’s Digital Storm Drainage Master Plan: Communicating Flood Risk through Interactive Web Mapping
Josephine Sajbel, Stantec
This presentation highlights the transformation of a 230-page stormwater master plan into a GIS platform using ArcGIS Hub and ArcGIS Experience Builder. The project combined updated modeling, GIS schema improvements, and interactive web mapping to support both engineering analysis and public education. The platform includes flood risk mapping, infrastructure improvement projects, and document access tools designed for a wide range of users. Amidst balancing technical functionality with accessibility, designing repeatable workflows, and creating user-focused maps, the SDMP aims to help the community to better understand flood risk and prioritize capital investments related to flood mitigation projects.

.fillyay() or .fillnay()? Evaluating Weather Data Gap-Filling Strategies for Operational Fire Danger Modeling
Tracy Tien, Texas A&M Forest Service
Data gaps from weather stations are inevitable and a common flare-up in fire weather modeling. This project develops a Google Cloud Platform framework that builds a historical ERA5 Land Hourly weather archive leveraging Google Earth Engine and BigQuery to gap-fill observations from weather stations. Five gap-filling methods were evaluated using the National Fire Danger Rating System python module, across a sample of weather stations varying in data completeness, climatology length, and geography. Performance was validated against fire occurrence data, and the results inform on-going enhancements to the operational fire danger products for the state of Texas.

Agentic mapping on the web
Kristian Ekenes, Esri
In this talk I’ll provide an overview of how you can build web mapping applications that allow end users to explore, and even create, fully interactive web maps using a natural language interface. You’ll learn how AI components and agents empower map authors, app developers, and end users of web mapping applications to be more efficient in their workflows. I’ll summarize pros and cons of using AI to create web mapping applications and review what this means for the future of web mapping and why having a solid foundation of geographic and cartographic knowledge matters more now than ever.

Collaborative Mapmaking at Audubon: From Story Through Design
Julie Rossman, National Audubon Society
Ryan Hobbs, National Audubon Society
This session offers a look into how the Enterprise GIS and Design teams at the National Audubon Society collaborate with editors, artists, and editorial leadership to produce maps from early concept through final publication for Audubon Magazine.
We'll walk through our end-to-end process: working with editors to understand the story a map needs to tell, developing an art direction that serves the content, hiring and guiding illustrators, sourcing and visualizing data layers, and navigating the messy reality of bringing it all together. We'll use a map created for a story about the ecological impacts of Russia’s war against Ukraine as our central case study.
A key theme is collaboration: how GIS sits at the intersection of data, design, editorial judgment, and artistic vision, and what it takes to make that intersection productive. We’ll close with additional examples—including maps on plastics in the ocean, poaching in Cyprus, and sage grouse habitat loss—and we’ll discuss lessons we've learned in fact-checking, data sourcing, and an honest look at what we'd do differently.

Workflow Development When Designing Maps and Data Visualizations for Print
Harman Singh, Pennsylvania State University
Fritz Kessler, Pennsylvania State University
This session explores the challenges faced when developing a design workflow for print visuals included in a book that takes a data-driven design and cartographic storytelling approach. Specifically, this session draws on a book project that pieces together point data related to the U-boat campaign's geographic operations during World War II. Topics covered during this talk will include constraints and considerations for print design, such as color, scale, and layout; designing workflows across multiple software, such as ArcGIS Pro, R, and Adobe Illustrator; and discussion around the use of small multiples, multivariate symbolism, and statistical analysis.

Hating on choropleths (but in a nicer way)
Kelsey Taylor, Stamen Design
Eric Brelsford, Stamen Design
Choropleths are one of the most common types of maps clients ask us for at Stamen. In some cases, they are a totally legitimate way to aggregate and visualize data. But, in many cases, they introduce major biases, overemphasize certain types of areas, or are tied to scales that are not appropriate for the data on the map. Cartographers often face a tradeoff between simplicity, legibility, and meaningfulness that make choropleths rank low on the list of enjoyable maps to make.
In this talk, we will focus on alternative approaches that we prefer (maps and otherwise!) and where we feel like they have been the most successful.

Law, Organizing, and Cartography
Lucy Roberts-Widdison, Harriet Tubman Fellow, Coalition for Property Tax Justice
Modern spatial data practices create, perpetuate, and exacerbate racial differences in housing outcomes. For example, in the majority-Black city of Detroit, 1 in 4 of the lowest value homes have been illegally foreclosed since 2009 because of spatial interpolation methods that ignore the majority of residential sales. In Milwaukee, utility and zoning tickets similarly result in grim property foreclosure rates. This presentation explores the role cartographers can play in illuminating and dismantling racist policies, drawing on the Institute for Law and Organizing’s decade of community organizing work in the City of Detroit and emerging work in Milwaukee.

Building a document framework to support ethics in cartography
Nat Case, INCase, LLC
Chelsea Nestel, University of Oregon
Aileen Buckley, ESRI
The ICA Commission on Ethics in Cartography has been running a series of workshops this summer exploring the elements and framing of ethical codes that cartographers work with, especially in map-centered organizations. The plan is to offer (1) a library of codes of ethics or conduct, statements of principles, or other documents that organize ethical guidelines, (2) a structured list of topics that are already commonly raised, or should be raised, and (3) the range of types of documents and document structures and how they address the needs of their constituents. We'll outline what we've come up with so far and leave time for group feedback.

Fractured Epistemologies/Cartographies of Disinformation
Chelsea Nestel, University of Oregon
Carolyn Fish
Kelly Bonnville-Sexton
Sarah Haedrich
Joy Ihuka
Mason Leavitt
Lauren Walker
Jasper Zhou
What’s real anyway? Does it seem like somehow it doesn’t matter anymore? Although we have always operated within and benefited from fractured epistemologies (knowledge systems), the world feels different now. A global pandemic, dis/misinformation, AI, and social media exploit that we hold different truths, approach the world from different perspectives, and make different choices. Thus, the connection of maps to reality has never been more unclear. This new world has cartographers in an identity crisis, because cartography has focused on making maps that work. This research agenda presents challenges and opportunities resulting from the current epistemic fracturing.

Map Meets Meme: Visualizing Geographic Ignorance in Trump-Era Cartographic Satire
Raechel Portelli, University of Illinois
Antonio Smith, Antonio Antoine Cartography
What happens when "Map meets Meme" in today's U.S. political climate? I will present the results of a study on internet memes that pair maps with caricatures of U.S. President Donald Trump , examining how these juxtapositions render geographic ignorance visible. I argue that these memes highlight Trump's own geopolitical ignorance, but also of geographic ignorance of Americans more broadly. Combining concepts of viral maps (Robinson 2019) and strategic ignorance as a tool of the powerful (McGoey 2012). I conclude that these memes blur the distinction between personal and structural ignorance.

Maps as a Site of Reproductive Justice
Abby Whelan, Syracuse University
Maps and map-based dashboards have proliferated since the United States Supreme Court Dobbs v. Jackson decision, which removed federal protections for the right to abortion. In this presentation, I examine these maps as sites of reproductive injustice by illustrating the multi-scalar and intersecting impacts of uneven reproductive healthcare access on the experiences of birthing people and their right to have or not have a child. More specifically, I use a content analysis to analyze a corpus of state and national maps and map-based dashboards. I unpack their data and design decisions that reinforce the political, racial, and economic forces which constrain the choices available to birthing people. I conclude by arguing for maps as sites for reproductive justice and offer best practices for future maps of reproductive experiences.

I am not sure we are ever quite sufficiently surprised at our capacity to read maps.
Mark Denil, sui generis
I am not sure we are ever quite sufficiently surprised at our capacity to read maps. This capacity is astonishing, because a map is so completely and utterly artificial, so contrived, so distinct and detached from any direct relationship with that which it supposedly depicts, as to be, save for learned, cultural conventions, without connection to the world, and certainly without intrinsic meaning. Our understanding of these learned, cultural conventions rest upon maps we have seen, and is actuated by means of aesthetic value judgments we make on the artifact in hand—before we can even begin to read the map.

The Joy of Color
Elaine Guidero
Jim Thatcher, Oregon State University
Have we hit the age of quiet luxury cartography? Maps praised as “tasteful” look like the Succession wardrobe. Subdued neutral tones code as sophistication and elegance in fashion and seemingly now cartography. Does Design-with-a-capital-D mean avoiding bold hues and high saturation? Color is an essential part of the zeitgeist and has deep ties to emotion and language—but perhaps we use these to limit ourselves. I will tease apart some of these connections, with an eye to the ways class and race are contextualized in design, and show the joy in exploring a wider color palette.

Creating giant map images for the National Geographic Museum of Exploration
Sam Guilford, National Geographic Society
As part of the redesign of the new National Geographic Museum of Exploration, the NGS Geography & Mapping team created many maps for use in different contexts throughout the space. In this talk, I’ll discuss the ideation, research, and production of some wall-sized satellite maps I created for an education exhibit. The exhibit illustrates geographic concepts such as place, pattern, and scale, and my aim was to create accompanying map graphics that would be thematically illustrative and visually compelling. Curating and pulling together a museum is a dynamic and iterative process, and I’ll show some of the steps that led to the pieces selected for the final exhibit. Not everything makes it through!

Cartographic Interpretation of a Different Kind: Applying Museum Principles to Map Design
Eric Johnson, Library of Virginia/Compass & Quill
Museum interpretation as a field is concerned with the art and science of connecting visitors to places and collections. There are striking resonances between the worlds of cartographic design and museum interpretation. Both focus on taking complex information and communicating it meaningfully to audiences in creative and compelling ways. Interpretation experts advance a series of formal professional principles—e.g. "Any interpretation [map] that does not somehow relate what is being displayed or described to something within the personality or experience of the visitor [viewer] will be sterile.” In this session we will explore how these interpretive principles can help you frame afresh your approaches to your own cartographic work.

It’s Alive! Using Art & Design to Spark Ideas for More Interesting Map Layouts
Scott Schiller, Maps by Scott, Milwaukee
A map has a variety of elements, but the layout should be greater than the sum of its parts. The best maps don’t just visualize data, they grab our attention, communicate a story, and evoke an emotion. Once you can identify what makes a map layout more meaningful, you can be intentional about designing the overall composition, and bring vitality to your layout. I will share ideas on how to activate your creativity, such as type, color, balance, space and graphics. If you’re curious how to energize your map layouts, these tips can help!

Animated Maps 101: How we use maps in motion to inform 8 million subscribers on YouTube
Ryan Shields, Newpress
Every month, millions of people come to YouTube to learn from four independent journalists about sports, geopolitics, OSINT investigations, and pop culture. Maps and charts are often at the center of those stories. Here's a look behind the scenes at the tools and techniques our team of self-taught mappers use to create Emmy Award-winning maps that captivate millions.