China recently released their global land cover map online, for anyone to view and download. It presents land cover at 30 m resolution, far superior to any previous map. It’s a brilliant achievement and provides data that up until now has only been available at great expense and could only be viewed with specialist tools. I’ve been having fun browsing it to find study sites and favourite places.

There’s something a little strange about it though. Look closely at the logo representing forests, then imagine the scene in the National Geomatics Center of China.

A: Let’s release our global land cover map to the world to display the glory of Chinese science!
B: We should add nice cartoons to illustrate each cover type.
A: Who will design those?
B: Don’t worry, we’ll just do a Google search and take the first thing that comes up.

And so it was that they came to represent forests using the logo of Nottingham Forest Football Club. Either that or someone at CAS is a secret fan of English lower-league football. Truly bizarre.