A friend of mine plans a big thing: Driving the whole Panamericana from Alaska all the way to Tierra del Fuego. While talking to him and his family it turned out that maps are a big issue and while casually checking out the route I realized there’s much improvement needed.

I don’t have a real plan yet, but while checking against several USGS and NASA WMS-services I also realized that the Panamericana crosses several zones prone to natural hazards, e.g.: * Landslides * Volcanic hazards * Earthquakes

Bringing all the data together in QGIS I was shocked that so many people are living there, villages are completely uncharted, no interconnecting roads available, it’s truly terrifying.

Just look at these examples; I checked an area in Guatemala north of the volcano Tajumulco; the status of this volcano is unclear, but nevertheless, there’s a clear landslide hazard: Bing Aerial (click for fullscreen)

Bing Aerial with OSM Layer (click for fullscreen)

Same as above, but with Landslide Hazard Assesment (click for fullscreen)

Something needs to be done and I just gave it a go.

Sidenote: Since the satellite imagery is just in a very sorry state for some regions, I’m currently messing around with Sentinel imagery.

(Edit: Just figured out that Google doesn’t allow deep embedding of images anymore. So I had to fix my SELinux permissions on my webserver first… problems, problems - everywhere!)