New Watershed Map Reveals the Pacific Northwest of North America in Vivid Color
In this beautiful high resolution watershed map of Cascadia, all the permanent and temporary streams and rivers of the Cascadia Bioregion, including hundreds of watersheds, are shown in beautiful rainbow colours, divided into catchment areas. Stretching for more than 2500 miles along the Pacific Coast, the Cascadia bioregion is comprised of 75 distinct ecoregions that spread across an incredible diversity and range of habitats, wilderness and landscapes.
These watersheds stretch from South East Alaska to Northern California, and from the crest of the continental divide to the Pacific coast westward as far as salmon swim. The map by geographer Szűcs Róbert, shows the waterways using the Strahler Stream Order Classification which means the larger the body of water, the thicker the line, and help show the impact of watersheds on development in the United States and Canada – as well as on pre-existing and existing cultural and environmental systems.
Free Download:
Please feel free to download, print and share our free version of the Cascadia hydrology map. Please provide attribution to Cascadia Illahee or Department of Bioregion. We <3 linkbacks.
Water is the lifeblood of any bioregion. The Cascadia bioregion defines the Pacific Northwest of North America by the watersheds of the Columbia, Fraser, and Snake River valleys. These rivers give life to a region, and tell the story of this place. Depicted here for the first time, is the complete series of rivers that make up the hydrology of the Cascadia bioregion, not divided into the United States or Canada, but rather, one complete systems of interconnected streams, rivers and waterways.
Our Cascadia Hydrological Map shows in fascinating detail how our rivers and streams flow and interconnect, merge and diverge, carrying life to the land. Cascadia has long inspired generations of cartographers, geographers, planners and visionaries. The flow of water also has an inherent aesthetic elegance that our map captures beautifully.
Watersheds, like Cascadia, transcend arbitrary borders, and are critical in understanding where our water comes from, and where it goes, as well as engaging with all of the communities affected by that discussion. Creating these holistic cultural, economic, ecological and democratic systems are why ideas like Cascadia are so important.
Posters & Prints
For anyone interested - we also have high resolution Digital Prints that print out 24 x 36 inch posters at 300 DPI available for $5, or original artwork printed posters in either 18x24 or 24x32 in poster matte printing, or as glicee’ fine art prints. 10% of all earnings go to support the Alaska Whale Foundation.
About the Artist - Robert szucs
Robert Szucs is a digital cartographer turned artist who saw the potential to turn nature's patterns into contemporary artwork. Under his moniker Grasshopper Geography, the Hungarian artist creates informative and beautiful maps about a wide range of geographic subjects, from rivers to forests and population density to elevation. The maps were made mostly with the open-source QGIS software, GIMP and open GIS data. Szűcs Róbert is a geographer and GIS analyst who combines his work with a lifelong passion for beautiful maps, making most of them in his off time between jobs and travelling. As part of these maps, he has also developed beautiful maps of Africa, South America and Europe by their watersheds, as well by forest density.
His colorful maps began as a creative outlet and an escape from everyday office drudgery, but since then he has worked with clients from dozens of countries and every continent. His works featured in countless articles from CNN to The Washington Post and a lot of others, and also in books, documentary films, textbooks, museums, classrooms, and thousands of homes and offices around the world.
Szucs frequently contributes maps to fundraisers, and regurarly volunteers his mapmaking and GIS skills to NGOs. He has volunteered years in total for different organizations, spending an average of three to six months in each location. He has worked for archaeologists on the tiny Caribbean island of St. Eustatius, with marine biologists in Alaska, and in an orangutan conservation program in Indonesian Borneo, amongst others.
