Mapping a God

Niyamgiri in Western Orissa is currently the site for a number of controversial projects controlled by Vedanta Resources Plc (UK). The Dongria Khond tribe, who inhabit the region, revere the hill as a god and oppose plans to convert it into an open-pit bauxite mine.

This is a 100m-interval labeled contour map of the hill created using SRTM data. I'm thinking about using Landsat data along with spatial data from other sources to see whether visible changes have been generated by the extant projects.

Since this blog is primarily a cartographic display site, readers who are interested (and furious) like me can Google the words [Church England Vedanta bauxite Orissa Niyamgiri dongria khond human rights violations] in any order, or just access Amnesty International's extremely lucid and well-written report on the topic here, for more information.

Inverse Distance Weighting

This is a raster map (created by the inverse distance weighting technique) using NASA SRTM data as an elevation source. I've used red panda (Ailurus fulgens) presence/absence data collected by my colleague Tanushree; the scale is a gradient from white (high probability of presence) to black (low probability of presence). The underlying layer is a Landsat false-colour image.

There's no scale on this map because the skewed perspective means that the scale increases towards the horizon, and decreases towards the observer.