Maps and mappers of the 2020 GeoHipster calendar: Nikita Slavin, April

Q: Tell us about yourself.

A: I’m a 29 years old student from the Cartography M. Sc. Program, from Saint-Petersburg, Russia. I hope it will go well and this September I’ll successfully defend my thesis about the exhibition methods of historical maps in mixed reality.

I obtained my first degree at St-Petersburg University in 2012, Faculty of Geography and Geoecology, Department of Cartography and Geodesy.

After graduating from university, I explored several fields: geodesy, UAV mapping and GIS in nature protection. During my service at the Kronotsky National Reserve on the Kamchatka Peninsula, the land of bears and volcanoes, I was a GIS engineer. I participated in a lot of different projects: the development of a GIS system; geodynamic monitoring systems; educational projects and making a lot of different maps. During my time on the Kamchatka Peninsula, I realised that I want to develop myself as a cartographer and fortunately I was enrolled in our perfect cartography master program.

I’m an outdoor person: hiking, rowing, cycling trips. My side job is a tourist guide. I’m happy then as I meet beautiful maps for these activities. In the school I was into competitive orienteering – maybe this is one of the reasons for my love of maps.

In map-making I’m trying to find a way to combine modern and classic technology, approaching high-quality mapping standards in a digital era. You can see some examples in my Behance portfolio. Also, there are some examples of my little hobby – making wooden maps. I don’t know that I’m going to do after graduation – kind of looking for job from autumn- maybe this post could help to find it 😉

 

Q: Tell us the story behind your map (what inspired you to make it, what did you learn while making it, or any other aspects of the map or its creation you would like people to know).

A: This square map in the Pierce projection is a rebuild of my original “Ocean Plastic Map” for the book-atlas project “SDGs in action” (in preprint process now). “Ocean Plastic Map” was created during the course “Project Map Creation” (the very cool one) of the second semester (my best) in Vienna – you can see it on Behance. Warm thanks to our teacher Manuela Schmidt.

When I was looking for an idea for that course, I thought that it could be interesting to visualize the problem of plastic pollution in our oceans: describe the sources of plastic waste, plastic transportation, and its global distribution.

I enjoy DIY things: that’s why I developed an idea of making a volumetric map – stacking semi-transparent layers could show underwater relief in 3 dimensions rather than just 2. Also, the idea of making a map about plastic pollution made from plastic seemed quite cool and ironic for me. To make it more artistic I decided to represent pollution with common plastic objects: bottles, straws and plastic bags. The process was not easy going as expected, but it was worth it. 

For the first stage of the project, I looked for the data – many thanks to Laurent C. M. Lebreton for the very friendly cooperation and providing data. Laurent C. M. Lebreton was one of the co-authors of the paper “Plastic Pollution in the World’s Oceans: More than 5 Trillion Plastic Pieces Weighing over 250,000 Tons Afloat at Sea” and Timo Franz from Dumpark – their project Sailing seas of plastic is unbelievably impressive.

Whilst working on the project I realized that we simply don’t know all sides of the plastic pollution problem and how to solve it. I hope that my small contribution helps in making things clearer.

The square version presented in the Geohipster calendar is made for the project “SDGs in action”. One of our lectures, Markus Jobst, invited me to participate with my map. One of the requirements was to use the Pierce projection – and the map looks surprisingly good with it.

 

Q: Tell us about the tools, data, etc., you used to make the map.

A: Software stack:

  • QGIS for some pre-processing
  • ArcGIS Pro for processing data and the raw design stage
  • Adobe Illustrator with the incredible great plug-in Collider Scribe from Astute Graphics for the final design

Data Sources:

  • ETOPO2 for bathymetry
  • Natural Earth data for the world relief shading, country borders and rivers

Data about plastic pollution from the paper “Plastic Pollution in the World’s Oceans: More than 5 Trillion Plastic Pieces Weighing over 250,000 Tons Afloat at Sea” as mentioned above


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