Showcase Your Storytelling Skills through the 2024 ArcGIS StoryMaps Competition
“We like to think that our story demonstrates how one small idea can spur community action to work towards a more sustainable future.” —Ella Ashford and Riley Forth, Willamette University in Oregon, student winners of the 2023 ArcGIS StoryMaps Competition for Recovering Lost Crab Pots of the Salish Sea
It’s that time again. The annual ArcGIS StoryMaps Competition is underway, and this year, we’re looking for stories about creating a better world.
Are you passionate about the planet? Invested in sustainable cities, public health, or disaster response? Excited about innovation in and beyond the classroom?
Use your unique talents — from cartography and data analysis to photography and design — to tell your story with ArcGIS StoryMaps. Then submit it to the 2024 ArcGIS StoryMaps Competition: Storytelling for a better world by December 6th.
Watch the video by Andria Olson, Esri’s StoryMaps team, for more details. Before she joined Esri, Andria worked as a GIS Librarian at Stanford University. Fun fact, she won the 2019 ArcGIS StoryMaps Competition for her story Pancakes and Silver. Get her take on the experience and what she gained professionally and personally from the competition.
Meet Prior Competition Winners
What makes a winning story, you may ask? Meet a few more competition winners from previous years and get their advice before you get started.
Leah Fulton
Whether it is sitting at the bottom of the ocean or appearing on our shorelines along the coast of Nova Scotia, teams are working towards the shared goal of reducing the impact of ghost gear. Science communication is an important way to highlight these efforts, and storytelling has the ability to create meaningful connections. —Leah Fulton, student winner of the 2021 ArcGIS StoryMaps Challenge for The Tale of Lost Fishing Gear
When she won the challenge, Leah Fulton was a graduate student at Dalhousie University in Canada. She completed a Bachelor of Community Design, Honors in Urban Design and Planning, with a GIS certificate at Dalhousie University. It was where she gained a strong interest in landscape-level planning and park planning. Looking to understand the issues beyond the shoreline, Leah continued her studies in the Masters of Marine Management program at Dalhousie University. For Leah’s master’s graduate project, she worked with Coastal Action and Ocean Tracking Network, evaluating the effectiveness of using side scan sonar as a gear detection method for large-scale ghost gear retrieval missions.
Josef Münzberger
That's when I understood that with the help of GIS tools and spatial analysis, I could retell this story with an emphasis on ‘where’. —Josef Münzberger, student winner of the 2023 ArcGIS StoryMaps Competition for Dante’s Inferno
When he won the competition, Josef Münzberger was in his second year of the Ph.D. study program for Geodesy and Cartography at Czech Technical University in Prague. Encouraged by his colleagues to submit his unique story, Dante's Inferno went on to win the digital humanities and popular culture category in the 2022 ArcGIS StoryMaps Competition.
Brian Hettler
"The communities are the protagonists. And that's the key part." —Brian Hettler, winner of the IUCN Indigenous Peoples Governance and Rights Award in the 2023 ArcGIS StoryMaps Competition for Living Territories
For the past 12 years, Brian Hettler has led mapping and GIS for the Amazon Conservation Team. Working in close collaboration with Indigenous communities, Brian has led participatory mapping initiatives in Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Suriname, and Guyana to create cultural maps that record and preserve traditional knowledge and support Indigenous rights and community-based conservation efforts. Brian also leads the Amazon Conservation Team's efforts to map and monitor Isolated Indigenous peoples in the Amazon rainforest using high-resolution satellite imagery.
Brian supports a diverse, interdisciplinary mapping team of approximately 20 people across South America in the use of maps and field data-collection tools and methodologies that support conservation efforts. The Living Territories story was created in close collaboration with the Amazon Conservation Team Colombia.
Resources to Enter the Competition
Once you’ve checked out the advice from former Storytellers of the Year, take a look at these ArcGIS StoryMaps resources to guide your storytelling process.
- 2024 ArcGIS StoryMaps Competition website with the entry form
- ArcGIS StoryMaps product website with a story gallery, resources page, and StoryScape e-magazine
- Our competition announcement blog post, Enter the 2024 ArcGIS StoryMaps Competition to build a better world together
- And the Storytelling for a better world hub with resources for each competition category
Be sure to follow us on @ArcGISStoryMaps on X (formerly Twitter) and the ArcGIS blog for competition and product updates.
Don't wait too long - your deadline to enter the competition is December 6th.
We can’t wait to see what you create!
