Study Area Map Maker for Thesis and Research Papers

Heading to the field? Install this site from your browser menu and this tool works with no signal. See how

How to use this tool

Pick a template along the top, then work down the left column. The Map panels section controls one panel at a time, so click Panel a, Panel b and so on to switch between them. Set the extent level for each panel, choose a country and, if you need it, a state or province. Drag on any panel to shift it and scroll on it to zoom. Double click anywhere on a panel to drop a study site at that coordinate.

The input people get wrong is the extent level of the first panel. A locator panel is supposed to be the wide one, so set panel a to Whole world or Country and leave the detail for the last panel. The dashed box drawn on a panel is always the extent of the panel that follows it, which is why the box vanishes if you put the widest map last.

Point data comes in three ways. Type a latitude and longitude, paste a block of comma separated rows, or upload a CSV. Column names are matched loosely, so name, label, site, station and well all work for the label column, and lat, latitude and y all work for latitude. Everything is read in your browser. No file is sent anywhere.

What the panels are actually doing

A study area figure has one job: place a small piece of ground inside a frame the reader already understands. That is why the standard form is a cascade. The world or the country establishes context, the province narrows it, and the last panel carries the survey furniture, meaning the scale bar, the north arrow, the coordinate grid, the site symbols and the legend.

Each panel is fitted independently. The tool takes the geographic box for that panel, projects the corners and the edges, and scales the result to fill the frame while keeping the aspect honest. Nothing is stretched. If a panel has slack it appears as even margin on both sides, never as a squashed coastline, which is the failure you see most often in figures assembled by hand in a drawing program.

The connector lines are drawn from the corners of the extent box to the corners of the next frame, and the geometry is worked out from where the two frames actually sit on the canvas. Move a panel and the connectors follow. This matters more than it sounds, because hand drawn connectors that no longer match the box are one of the more common reasons a reviewer asks for a figure to be redone.

Where the boundaries come from and how good they are

Country outlines and lakes come from Natural Earth at the ten million scale, simplified and stored as TopoJSON so the whole world arrives in about 860 kilobytes. State and province boundaries are the same source, 4,595 units across 250 countries, loaded separately the first time you need them. District and county boundaries are not bundled at all, because a global set at that level runs to hundreds of megabytes. When you press Load districts the tool asks geoBoundaries for the ADM2 layer of that one country and reads it straight into the browser.

Simplification costs you a little shape, so it is worth knowing how much. Computing the spherical area of each polygon and comparing it against published figures gives New Brunswick as 72,699 square kilometres against an official 72,908, which is 0.29 percent low. Germany comes out 0.43 percent low, Texas 1.45 percent low, Canada 0.95 percent low. Chile is the worst of the ones checked at 3.5 percent low, and the reason is the southern fjords, where thousands of small islands and inlets are exactly what a simplification pass removes first.

So the figures are honest at figure scale and are not a substitute for a survey. If you need a boundary to a metre, bring your own file. If you need a study area outline that reads correctly at 100 millimetres across a journal column, this is more than enough.

Projections, and which one to pick

Leave it on Automatic unless you have a reason not to. The rule is simple: a span wider than 170 degrees gets Robinson because it is the least ugly way to show the whole world, anything wider than 60 degrees or sitting above 66 degrees latitude gets Lambert azimuthal equal area because cylindrical projections fall apart near the poles, and everything else gets an equidistant cylindrical projection with the standard parallel set to the centre of the map.

That last one deserves a note. A plain equirectangular map stretches east to west as you move away from the equator, which is why Scandinavia looks wrong on so many quick figures. Setting the standard parallel to the middle latitude of your own map cancels most of that, so a box a hundred kilometres across measures the same on screen whether you run the ruler along it or up it. At New Brunswick latitudes the two directions agree to better than one percent.

Pick Mercator only if you need north to be up everywhere and angles preserved, for example when the figure sits next to a web map screenshot. Pick Lambert azimuthal equal area if you are comparing areas, because it is the only one of the four that keeps them.

A worked check you can repeat

Set the template to Cascade of three. Panel a to Whole world, panel b to Country with Canada, panel c to State or province with New Brunswick. Turn on the coordinate grid for panel c. Paste these five rows into the point box and press Read the text above.

name,lat,lon,group
BH01,45.9636,-66.6431,Borehole
BH02,45.2733,-66.0633,Borehole
OC01,46.0878,-64.7782,Outcrop
OC02,45.6000,-65.3000,Outcrop
GS01,47.0000,-67.3000,Gauge

Panel c fits itself to a box running 69.806 west to 63.032 west and 44.120 north to 48.561 north. The cards below the map report a ground scale of 0.485 kilometres per pixel on an 1800 by 1200 canvas, a study area of 72,699 square kilometres, and UTM zone 19N, EPSG 32619, at the centre of the panel.

Now check the scale bar by hand. The bar reads 150 kilometres and is drawn 309.2 pixels long. Multiply the two numbers the other way round: 309.2 pixels times 0.485 kilometres per pixel is 150.0 kilometres, so the drawing and the label agree. The stronger check is independent of that arithmetic. Take the two ends of the bar, convert both back to latitude and longitude through the inverse projection, and run the great circle distance between them. That returns 149.996 kilometres, which is 0.003 percent off the stated value, and it is a genuine cross check because the bar length and the distance calculation share no code.

That agreement holds because this panel uses an equidistant cylindrical projection, where the scale barely changes across a province. Run the same check on a continent wide Lambert panel and the residual grows to about 0.6 percent, because the scale genuinely varies from one side of that map to the other. The bar is measured at the place it is drawn, so it is right at the bar and only approximate elsewhere. That is the honest behaviour of any single scale bar on a large map, and it is another reason to keep the bar on the detail panel.

One more you can do on paper. BH01 at 45.9636 north, 66.6431 west and BH02 at 45.2733 north, 66.0633 west are 89.0 kilometres apart by the haversine formula. Measure that separation against the scale bar on the exported figure and you should land within a pixel or two.

Exporting for a journal

Three formats, and they are not interchangeable. PNG renders the whole scene again at up to four times the canvas size, so a 1800 by 1200 layout becomes 7200 by 4800 pixels of real detail rather than an upscale. SVG writes the same scene as vector paths and live text, typically a megabyte or so for a detailed panel, and it opens in Illustrator or Inkscape with every coastline still editable. PDF wraps a high resolution render at 200 dots per inch into a single page sized to match.

If the journal asks for vector art, send the SVG. If it asks for 300 dpi raster at a fixed column width, work out the pixel width you need and set the canvas to it before exporting the PNG. The PDF is the one to use when you just want something to drop into a report or hand to a supervisor.

The canvas and the SVG are drawn through the same drawing layer, so the two outputs cannot drift apart. Rendering both and comparing them pixel by pixel puts the difference at 0.09 percent of sampled pixels, all of it edge antialiasing and text metrics.

Mistakes that catch people out

Longitude and latitude the wrong way round. A site that lands in the Indian Ocean off Somalia almost always means the two columns were swapped, since that is where zero and zero sits. The tool rejects rows outside the valid range but a swapped pair often stays valid, so check the first point before you plot fifty.

Missing the minus sign on western longitudes. Coordinates copied from a report that writes 66.64 W as a plain number will drop your New Brunswick sites into Kazakhstan. Anything east of Greenwich in a Canadian dataset is worth a second look.

Putting the scale bar on the locator panel. It is not wrong, it is just useless. A bar on a world panel reads 5000 kilometres and tells the reader nothing. Keep the bar, the north arrow and the coordinate grid on the detail panel, and leave the locator with its extent box and nothing else.

Zooming so far that the boundary generalisation shows. Past roughly 50 metres per pixel the coastline starts to look like a polygon rather than a coast, because that is the resolution of the underlying data. If your study area is a single quarry, use the coordinate grid and your own points and stop expecting the shoreline to be surveyed.

Assuming districts exist everywhere. The ADM2 layer is fetched country by country and some countries have no published open set. When that happens the tool says so instead of drawing something invented. Fall back to the state or province level, or bring your own boundary and plot it as points.

What this tool does not do

There is no satellite or street basemap behind the vectors. That is deliberate. Tiled imagery carries attribution and licence conditions that follow the figure into whatever you publish, it cannot be exported as vector, and most journal study area figures are cleaner without it. There is also no raster reprojection, no georeferenced overlay of your own imagery, and no analysis. It draws figures. For anything past that you want a real GIS.

Related Calculators and Reference

• Study area map examples ten finished layouts with what each is good for and the objection a reviewer raises.
• Study area map rules for a thesis the eight item checklist a supervisor or reviewer runs through before your figure is accepted.
• How to make a study area map online the five step walkthrough, from CSV coordinates to an exported figure.
• Sizing a study area figure for a journal column widths in pixels, the dpi arithmetic and when SVG beats PNG.
• Coordinate Converter: latitude and longitude to UTM for turning survey coordinates into the decimal degrees this tool expects, or back again once you have the zone.
• GPS Waypoint Logger to collect the site coordinates in the field first, then export the CSV you upload here.
• Natural Earth, the public domain cartographic dataset the country and province outlines in this tool are built from.