About

Why ARMAP? What’s in it? How is it different? and more.

ARMAP is a collaborative effort for the benefit of many agencies, organizations, and individuals.  See below for the who, what, why, and how of ARMAP.

Vision

ARMAP uses best practices with information and mapping technologies to provide a comprehensive perspective in support of Arctic science.

  • Learn more about research projects in your region of interest or scientific discipline
  • Explore available data or possible collaborations
  • Plan and coordinate field logistics
  • Use the online mapping tools to meet your own project’s specific goals

Projects and Agencies in the ARMAP Viewer

ARMAP encompasses scientific research projects across the Arctic. The majority of projects shown in the Viewer are funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

These projects span multiple research disciplines: Arctic ecology, hydrology, oceanography, the cryosphere, human dimensions, and much more. Not included are modeling projects that do not require field research. The projects may go back decades, or are currently active. Each location is typically mapped to a nearby base of logistical support. Each project may have multiple field locations.

Research Cruise Viewer

Also shown are ship tracks for Arctic research vessels, with tracks for NSF-supported scientific cruises going back several years for the Healy, Louis S. St-Laurent, Polar Sea, and others.  The ship tracks and associated metadata were initially manually harvested from various sources (e.g., Rolling Deck, UNOLS, Sailwx, Pangea, Alaska Marine Exchange, etc.), processed, and harmonized.  Since 2018, AIS tracking tracking was acquired for vessels from a licensed API provided by Kepler (formerly MarineTraffic) with coverage of the polar region.

Arctic Medical Facilities

Information on remote medical facilities was compiled to support field research logistics in the Arctic region. The Arctic Medical Facilities data contains information on emergency medical facilities in remote Arctic research hubs. Information includes the location of the facility, the name, address, phone number, website, access (Airport, Heliport, Unknown), level of care (Clinic, Hospital with Rotation Doctor, Full Service Hospital), and notes on access or care provided. This data is to aid logistic planers supporting Arctic research in accessing emergency medical care for the projects they support.  Data are available via a separate viewer.  Access may be requested to make suggestions or edits to these data.

What is the difference between ARMAP and AOV?

A companion application, the Arctic Observing Viewer (AOV), displays “data collection sites” — with higher-resolution locations and details for individual towers, boreholes, vegetation plots, weather stations, stream gauges, and other instrumentation sites.  Furthermore, AOV is focused on monitoring activities related to “Arctic Observing” networks. To learn more, visit ArcticObservingViewer.org.

Milestones

Ongoing development efforts behind the scenes results periodically in additional new features, performance, and functionality.  For more information, see the Milestones page.

The ARMAP Team

ARMAP’s web map viewer and data services are a collaborative development effort shared among:  Craig Tweedie, a postdoc, and students at the Systems Ecology Lab at the University of Texas at El Paso and Allison Gaylord with Nuna Technologies.  ARMAP was funded by the National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs from 2006-2025 but is not currently being maintained.  The application development provided a real-world test bed for student-driven cyberinfrastructure activities — ranging from systems architecture and programming to application design.

Technology

The foundation of ARMAP is a database management system, coupled with web services.  The web mapping application itself — the ARMAP Viewer — has been developed using ArcGIS Enterprise.  The viewer draws foremost from the National Science Foundation logistics database for the Arctic, maintained by Battelle. These data records are released as an XML-based REST web service conforming with an interagency project metadata standard established by the Alaska Data Integration Work Group (ADIwg).  This service is dynamically ingested into the Viewer reflecting updates to field based research efforts across the region. Thus, ARMAP is an information system built upon distributed yet interoperable data and services.

Logo

Citation

Gaylord, A.G., Barba, M., Kassin, A., Cody, R, and Tweedie, C.E. 2025, Arctic Research Mapping Application (ARMAP): Nuna Technologies, the University of Texas at El Paso. Digital Media.

https://armap.org/.

Photo Credits

Thanks go to Jason Briner (SUNY Buffalo), Ed Stockard, Robin Davies, Tom Holford, and Roy Stehle (SRI Inc.).

Disclaimer

This website is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Contract No. NSFDACS11C1675. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Data is provided without any guarantee of accuracy, completeness, or suitability for a particular purpose. These data are based upon the work supported by the National Science Foundation under Contract No. 49100420C0001 to Battelle Arctic Research Operations through January, 2025. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or the Battelle Memorial.