ArcGIS Living Atlas Blog

These global hexagons contain 82 summary statistics to help identify high biodiversity, find threatened species, investigate land use characteristics and more. Using the Global Hexagons for Biodiversity and Conservation means that this work can be done in minutes rather than days. We are continuing to support this process and now have an improved version of the Global Hexagons for Biodiversity and Conservation.

To learn more, visit this short article. 

Esri has partnered with the developer of HydroSHEDS, Confluvio Consulting, along with other international organizations to develop a higher resolution, more accurate network of streams and rivers for North and South America.

Three services are now available in Living Atlas:

1. River Streamlines: The centerline features for each stream and river. The layer provides attributes that describe flow direction, the upstream and downstream segments, along with information about the total stream network.
2. River Nodes: The node points define the start/end of a stream segment.
3. Basins: The drainage catchment area for each streamline segment.

To learn more about the services and sources, visit this blog.

In 2024, a Beta iNaturalist service was released into ArcGIS Living Atlas to bring citizen science observations into ArcGIS for visualization and analysis. From the beta release, feedback has been collected from the user community, and we are pleased to announce that there is now a new updated iNaturalist layer, in general availability.

This new layer provides over 150 million observations from iNaturalist, which allows the public to share the plants, animals, and organisms around them. This impressive display of citizen science allows the broader GIS and scientific community to better understand and validate the natural patterns which surround them.

For more information, refer to this full article. 

Along with the ArcGIS Online June 2026 update, we are excited to announce that a new Mapillary global street-level imagery (beta) is available in ArcGIS Living Atlas, accessing more than 3 billion street-level view images from Mapillary’s crowdsourced datasets that are growing daily.

Read the full blog for more information. 

We are excited for you to join us at this year’s 2026 Esri User Conference, July 13-17 in San Diego, California. As you plan your attendance for the mappiest week of the year either in person or virtually, check out the following resources to find all things ArcGIS Living Atlas and Ready-to-Use Content:

Learn how to find all things Living Atlas: https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/products/arcgis-living-atlas/announcements/find-arcgis-living-atlas...

Find all Living Atlas sessions: https://esriurl.com/LivingAtlasUC2026

We are pleased to announce that a new collection of selected demographic variables from WorldPop.org’s Global2 release is now available in the Living Atlas of the World. We have derived a collection of commonly used demographic variables from WorldPop’s 1-km resolution data for the years 2015, 2020, 2025, and 2030. Please see our announcement for more information.

Did you know that ArcGIS Living Atlas contains multiple layers on languages spoken in the United States? With so many options, it can be confusing to know which layers, or which attributes, are most suited for your specific purpose. Check out this short blog by Diana Lavery describing how to choose the right layer for your needs.

A Health Professional Shortage Area (HPSA) is a geographic area, population group, or health care facility that has been designated by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) as having a shortage of health professionals. 

These widely-used boundaries are now available at your fingertips within both ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Pro. Just search “HPSA” or “Health Provider Shortage Area” in Living Atlas. You can access the three categories – Primary Care, Dental Health, and Mental Health – as three different feature layers. Learn more by reading this blog.

Exposure to extreme heat and its impact on human health is becoming a more frequent concern for many communities and industries. We need reliable data to make robust recommendations and policies around heat stress. But temperature alone doesn’t always give us the full picture. To help make more comprehensive heat stress data more readily available, a new Global Wet Bulb Globe Temperature Baseline layer has been added to ArcGIS Living Atlas providing information about wet bulb globe temperature (WBGT), which gives us a better understanding of the human impact of high temperatures. 

To learn more, visit this blog.

With the introduction of calendar heat charts in ArcGIS Online Map Viewer, it’s now easier than ever to uncover temporal patterns hidden within large datasets. This short tutorial explores how to use calendar heat charts to analyze fatal vehicle crashes across the United States using the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and provided by Esri in ArcGIS Living Atlas.

To read the full article, visit this blog by Steven Aviles.