What is essential is invisible to the eye

In Saint-Exupéry’s book, the fox teaches that one sees clearly only with the heart. In geography, Waldo Tobler stated his first law in 1970: everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things. Between those two sentences lies the work of this atlas — finding, in Brazil’s open data, the proximities and absences a spreadsheet cannot show, and drawing them with enough rigour for others to reuse.

Three readers, one file

Architects and urban planners find clean vector data in GeoPackage, already styled for QGIS, ready to drop into a drawing. Researchers find datasets with a declared method, an explicit projection and a permanent DOI, citable on ORCID and Lattes. Those who just want to look find a feed of maps — one every two days — with a paragraph of context and no unnecessary jargon.

Plate principles

• Every map declares its source, extent, coordinate reference system (SIRGAS 2000 wherever possible) and software.
• Perceptually uniform, colour-blind-safe palettes (Viridis, Cividis) for continuous data.
• Projections suited to the extent: equal-area conic for the whole country, UTM for municipalities.
• The process is reproducible: each plate describes its method step by step — source, extent, operation, classification — so it can be repeated in any GIS.
• Every map, record and note is published in Brazilian Portuguese and British English, each dated like a news item.

Licence and reuse

Plates and derived data are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence. You may copy, adapt and use them commercially — in a design drawing, a report, a paper — as long as you cite the source. Each map comes with a ready-made APA, ABNT and BibTeX citation, with its Zenodo DOI. Source data (IBGE, INPE, MapBiomas and others) remain under their producers’ licences, listed in each record.

Contact and archive

Code, data and version history live in the GitHub repository. The permanent archive is the Zenodo community. Corrections, suggestions for new extents and data requests are welcome as issues in the repository — in Portuguese or English.

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