Navigate the Living Atlas of Canada Easily with this New Dashboard

July 27, 2022

Farah Hoque

The Living Atlas contains a plethora of authoritative and insightful content from Canada and across the globe to supplement the ArcGIS user experience. But how do you easily find GIS layers, web maps, apps and story maps from Canada? Well now you can with the new Living Atlas - Canada Content dashboard. Updated once a week, this dashboard features the Living Atlas curator’s pick of the month, trending items of the week, newest added items, live feeds, top categories, top item types and bilingual items.

The Living Atlas website is the go-to resource to discover items from authoritative contributors across the globe at a regional or country scale. But what about the items that are covered at a more granular or local scale?

Well, for those who attended the webinar ‘Not all treasure is silver & gold – A webinar about data’ in April, you may recall that I gave a short demo of the new Living Atlas – Canada Content dashboard, which allows users interested in Canadian content to visualize up-to-date information on items covered nationally, as well as at a provincial and territorial scale. The dashboard is updated once a week to capture trending and newly added items.

A dashboard with a map at the center surrounded by charts, graphs and text in varying shades of purple showing the newest Canadian content on the Living Atlas

Let’s go through seven key features available through the dashboard:

1) Filter by geography

Use the geography selector to filter items from one or more geographies.

Geography selector of the dashboard showing Canada’s provinces. British Columbia and Manitoba are selected with a check mark.

2) Curator’s pick of the month

This section includes details about a highlighted item I have curated for the current month.

Curator’s pick of the month section of the dashboard showing the item “Indigenous Geographical Names in English and French from the Government of Canada”

3) Trending and newest added items

Two boxes of text shown side by side. The first shows “Trending Items of the Week” and the second box shows “Newest Added Items” of the Living Atlas dashboard.

Get updates on trending Canadian items of the week sorted by the number of views and recently added items sorted by the month

4) Live feeds

View the list of near real-time Canadian live feeds and their update frequency.

A box of text listing the live feeds of Canadian content in the Living Atlas

5) Items with bilingual versions

Learn about the items in the Living Atlas that are available in both French and English.

A box of text listing the bilingual items in the Living Atlas

6) Top categories and item types

Get a breakdown of the main categories and top item types.

A pie chart showing the top categories of content in the Living Atlas in varying shades of purple. Beside it is a bar chart showing the top item types in the Living Atlas.

7) Detailed information about each item using popups

Once you have identified an item of interest, click on the popup for supporting information about each item such as the summary, item type, date created, thumbnail and a URL link to the item’s page on ArcGIS Online.

A web map of Canada with purple circles representing the items in the Living Atlas. A popup box shows details for the story map “What are the Census Geographies in Canada?”.

Explore the Living Atlas - Canada Content dashboard to discover content from your province or territory!

Notice any important Canadian datasets or apps missing from the dashboard and the Living Atlas? Fill out this short survey to put in a request to add an item.

If you have any inquiries or would like to nominate Canadian content (maps, apps or data) to the Living Atlas, please contact me at fhoque@esri.ca.

This post was translated to French and can be viewed here.