Map of the Week: Loss of farms in southern Ontario, 1991-2006

ASSOCIATED PRESS

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The top 15 Ontario counties (or county equivalents) for farm loss include Ottawa, Hamilton, Peel, Halton, York, Durham and Middlesex, all in areas which have seen suburban expansion. Here is a map.

 

Nerd box:

For the first time, we're using the Google Charts API in a map. As these things go, it was pretty painless to break up the code, put it in an Excel spreadsheet and reassemble it with the correct numbers to form a .png image, which is the chart. It actually worked the first time, something which is more or less unheard of around here. Click on any area to see data displayed in a bar graph.

Here's an example of what it looks like:

and here is the code that creates it:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=bvs&chd=t:32,25,20,13&chs=250x100&chl=1991|1996|2001|2006

Try pasting it into a browser window and changing the numbers in the sequence 32,25,20,13 or 1991|1996|2001|2006.

While we're on nerdboxery, it's also the first use of our new polygon set for Ontario county equivalents, which I look forward to using for census data. Our boundary sets can be labour-intensive to put together (they're either hand-drawn from scratch, which is a lot of work, or generated from .shp files, which always need a lot of manual intervention), and I like to reuse them.