My Maps is a quick and easy way to create interactive maps that visualize environmental change. Using My Maps you can add 10 layers of content, customize the appearance of your data, and embed a map in your website. New improvements allow you to export a CSV (spreadsheet) file from your map and update your map layers when new information is added to imported spreadsheet files.

In this session we will do hands-on activities to learn about ways to use Google Forms to gather information from the public, create a response spreadsheet, import the responses into a My Maps, update the map layer when new responses are added to the spreadsheet, customize the map layers, and export map layers as CSV files. We will learn how to fill out Google Forms on phones to facilitate community engagement, but participants will need a laptop in order to create Forms, Sheets, and My Maps. The focus will be on efficient workflows that can be used in community engagement and planning in this time of rapid environmental and climate change.

Case Study: https://sites.google.com/view/lakecoexample/home

We will begin by looking at how the Google platform can be used to visualize fires in Lake County, California, where a nonprofit, The Tribal EcoRestoration Alliance (TERA), is working to return cultural burning. For this session, our workshop example demonstrates how to use Google My Maps to visualize wildfire perimeters, locations of cultural burns, and contaminated sites (US EPA designated Superfund and Brownfields sites) on a simple mapping platform that can be easily shared with communities by embedding it in a website.

This case study also includes the use of Google Earth Pro to access historic imagery, and various ways to use the powerful Earth Engine platform to analyze burn scars and changes in tree cover over time. Earth Engine and storytelling with Google Earth to further the goals of the case study will the the subject of Technical Session 3: Earth Engine for Environmental Change and Technical Session 6: Indigenous Storytelling with Google Earth Web.

These are the files that were used to build the My Maps for this activity. The Google Doc named "notes and data sources" provide you with an explanation of how files were created and what public databases were used to provide files.

For this activity we will use a Google Form to create a Google Sheet, and then import the spreadsheet into a My Maps. You can use the QR code below to fill out the form on your phone, or you can fill out the form directly from this Google Site.

Please do not provide any private information as this example will be made public.

You can see the Response Sheet below the form (you may have to refresh the screen to see the answers). The My Maps is embedded below. If you want to create your own there is a slide presentation at the bottom of this activity with directions.

In this activity we will create a My Maps by adding points, lines and polygons, and then styling the map. The best place to begin is to explore the examples in the map gallery below in order to see the wide range of possibilities. Google My Maps is a simple tool that is very flexible and allows you to create maps quickly to share with your community.