ArcGIS Living Atlas Blog

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.

A collection of six new Annual National Land Cover Database (NLCD) products is now available in the ArcGIS Living Atlas. These 30-meter resolution layers, from the Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics (MRLC) consortium, offer a consistent, yearly snapshot of land cover use and change for the lower-48 states from 1985 to 2024:

• USA Annual NLCD – Land Cover
• USA Annual NLCD – Land Cover Change
• USA Annual NLCD – Land Cover Confidence
• USA Annual NLCD – Date Spectral Change
• USA Annual NLCD – Fractional Impervious Surface
• USA Annual NLCD – Impervious Descriptor

For full details about the new layers, visit this blog by the Living Atlas Environment Team. 

USA Cloud Cover Days is now available in the ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World, makes it easier than ever to integrate cloud cover information into your GIS workflows. This new imagery layer, derived from NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), provides the average number of days per year with cloud cover for the contiguous United States (CONUS) and portions of Mexico and Canada. With a 500-meter cell size, this data offers the spatial detail necessary for regional analyses in diverse environments.

To learn more about this layer, visit this full article by Raf Antwerpen

This just updated blog article now lists 12 (formerly 10) ways to get the most out of ArcGIS Living Atlas. If you've not yet fully incorporated Living Atlas into your workflows, this is a good introduction to the different ways it can be used by you, or your organization.

For more information, see Twelve ways to get the most out of ArcGIS Living Atlas, see the Living Atlas website, or view all Living Atlas blog articles.

Watch this GIS in Higher Education Chat on “Performing Raster Analysis using ArcGIS Living Atlas Imagery Layers in ArcGIS Online,” taking place on Tuesday, March 3, 2026 at 9:00 AM (PT).

Global Fishing Watch, an international nonprofit organization advancing ocean governance through transparency of human activity at sea, recently undertook a project increasing the level of ocean understanding for GIS users everywhere.  We’re excited to share that new Global Fishing Watch layers are now available in ArcGIS Online and in the ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World. This marks a significant milestone for the GIS community, providing direct access to powerful datasets designed to inform, inspire, and support efforts to protect our oceans.

To learn more about the layers and how to access them, visit this blog by @KeithVanGraafeiland. 

New American Community Survey layers are now available which contain the latest 2020-2024 5-year estimates from U.S. Census Bureau. New topics provided this year are occupants per room (crowded housing), and new attributes within specific Asian groups. For more information about transitioning from the older version of these layers and to learn more, visit the full blog by @DianaLavery1 here.