Certain Uncertainty – Mapping Waterstress

The paper describes our approach to visualize water stress in a geospatial context in relation to population density. Water stress or scarcity does always need to be reflected in context. While some parts of the world are only sparsely populated, the impact and mitigation of water stress in densely populated areas are potentially critical. While most water stress mappings focus on communicating the water stress within a tempo-spatial context, this project aims to map the water stress of selected capitals within the context of the global population density to enable the viewer to explore the interaction between both dimensions in a meaningful way. By focusing strongly on the data and removing all cartographic borderlines, an abstract space of mountain ranges remains, showing the world as a spatial accumulation of humans confronted with increasingly changing environmental conditions. In this paper, we describe the stepwise development process of the artifact starting data processing and how the individual physical layers were created.