Finally, I, Pinger, a volunteer from Taiwan now in GMS office NYC for a short visit, have uploaded 52 profiles of Taiwan Green Maps that were published in the past years onto the GMS website. As I worked through the maps, I found some very interesting maps, and also have some suggestions for mapmakers.

The interesting maps... Many interesting maps have a distinctive theme or a creative or unique way of looking at their communities. For example, a map for HsingChu, Taiwan, was created by students of an elementary school who went out to investigate their community and found sites that were environmental friendly and that were polluted or needed improvement. The students decided to create two maps for their community. One is called "Treasure Hunting" map that is the "Green Map" of their community, and the other "the Black Skull" map in which polluted sites were marked with skulls of different colors to indicate the level of pollution, and "remedies" were given to each polluted site.

Another group of students from Mei-Hwa elementary school, Taoyuan, decided to utilize their renowned whipping top tradition to create a map that was also a monopoly game. By playing the game, players and visitors are introduced to each green mapped sites. The map for Danshui River ecological corridor is a biking map that indicated bird watching sites along the river for bikers. Creative points of view always make a map interesting and fun to look at.

Suggestions for mapmakers: As you map locally, do think globally, that is, best to include a directional map which points out where your mapping area is in your country so that people who are interested in knowing the area you presented would be able to find out where it is!!!

Good work to all the Taiwanese mapmakers!! We have now 52 pieces of leaves on the island of Taiwan on the global map of GMS!