A Wordle-Style Forest Map

As social media feeds have been taken over by yellow and green squares, it seemed like a good idea to make a Wordle-style forest map. This effort was inspired by Alasdair Rae’s worldle maps.

The base of this map is a 30-meter resolution map of forest in Texas, which you can read more about here. To turn it into a Wordle-style map, I needed to generalize it to be represented by relatively large squares. To accomplish this, I created a grid of squares that seemed about the right scale for a tweet over the state of Texas. I then summed up the amount of forest in each one of those squares. Finally, I symbolized the centroid of each square with a large rounded square symbol, colored according to how much it was in Texas and how much forest it contained. To be included in Texas (not gray), at least 25% of the square had to fall within the state boundary. Within Texas, the green squares are at least 50% forest. I used ArcGIS Pro to do all of this and then added the text in Adobe Illustrator.

I hope you have some fun with this. And next time you’re playing Wordle, maybe you can take a second to think about forests.

Join the conversation!

To brighten your Monday, here’s a #wordle-style map of Texas forests. Read all about it here: https://t.co/0bJcIA3lR6.

Inspiration from @undertheraedar.#MonthlyMapMonday#MapMondaypic.twitter.com/tY7mYPXDM3

— Texas A&M Forest Service (@TXForestService) January 31, 2022