The Atlas of Canada is an Internet atlas published by Natural Resources Canada that has information on every city, town, village, and hamlet in Canada. It was originally a print atlas, with its first edition being published in 1906 by geographer James White and a team of twenty cartographers.
Similar to the Statistics Canada website, the Natural Resources Canada site offers a wide range of free download-able data through the linked site Geo Gratis. The Atlas of Canada has been around since 1906 and offers maps on the natural environment, people and society, the economy, history, climate change, freshwater and health, as well as reference, archival and topographic maps. Also available through the Atlas of Canada website is the Learning Resources tab, which provides interactive and non-interactive lesson plans for grades as low as 6 and as high as 12. In cartography many scholars are interested in how information or phenomenon from the real world can be better represented on a map. The key word being re-present, since maps bring to life a situation that has already occurred in the past to the present. The Atlas of Canada complies with cartography in that it is targeted toward educating youths in elementary and high school, which would develop their cognitive representation skills. Although there are some aspects of the website that can be improved upon. These are mostly fine details, but some times the smallest changes make the largest impacts and part of growing and developing a better functioning education tool requires improvements. Pro - Downs and Liben, 1988 write about maps being opaque and it requires skills, which are taught before they can be read and understand properly. They believe that something that does not have prior context has to be learned because without cognitive representations misinterpretations of maps is easily done. The Online Atlas of Canada supports this really well by providing numerous lessons plans under its Learning Resources tab Con - The Atlas of Canada is largely promoted as a learning tool for students to become more knowledgeable in GIS, poor colors used in their thematic maps could be influencing bad practices. Some of the sites thematic maps have unsatisfying color schemes based on the fact that the colors are too close in richness, making it difficult to decipher one color from the color above or below it. One of the ways Harrower and Brewer suggest to combat this issue is to utilize an online tool called the ColourBrewer, which assists map makers in picking the best suitable colours.
It can be used in much the same way as Google Earth or Mapquest. Much of the geospatial data is also freely available for download and non-commercial re-use, from the Atlas of Canada site or from GeoGratis. Information used to develop the Atlas of Canada is also used in conjunction with American and Mexican information to produce collaborative continental-scale tools such as the North American Environmental Atlas.
In addition, it contains statistical and historical information regarding:
- Bathymetric Areas
- Coastline and Shoreline
- Glaciers
- Land and Freshwater Areas
- Lakes
- Mountains
- National Parks
- Parks and Environment
- Rivers
- Sea Islands
- Waterfalls
- Weather
Famous quotes containing the words atlas and/or canada:
“A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razorstrap. A thin book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“This universal exhibition in Canada of the tools and sinews of war reminded me of the keeper of a menagerie showing his animals’ claws. It was the English leopard showing his claws.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)