select * from cool datasets

Yeah, apparently with some really large datasets there can be some patterns that are hard to notice visually but that jump right out when you listen....

that's nuts. the folks behind this group have been making a lot of conflict oriented maps for the NYT and other publications: https://www.conflict-ecology.org/about

Nice. I also work with a lot of spatial data, mostly for work (UK-oriented socioeconomic and demographic type data - for which I have a huge directory if anyone needs it), occasionally for fun or messing around to learn new R code or test new new visualisation ideas.

Some ideas:

Kaggle - seems to have a broad selection of stuff (albeit of varying quality); my favourite to date is probably data on the Eurovision Song Contest.

ONS internal migation data - one of my favourites to tinker with (https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/datasets/internalmigrationinenglandandwales), covering where people have moved to/from at local authority level in England and Wales going back several years.

Movebank.org - animal collar/satellite tracking data. It can be difficult to find datasets with large sample sizes but some are pretty robust. I got a lot of mileage out of some Arctic Fox data a couple years ago.

This github repo has a bunch of map layers, originally from the 70s and digitised in the 90s, for tree species of North America (https://github.com/wpetry/USTreeAtlas)

London Fire Brigade animal callouts - I've never managed to do much with this, but LFB has a years-long database of animal rescue callouts, which includes some real oddities like a bearded dragon getting stuck in a car engine and stuff like people getting stuck in trees after trying to retrieve cats stuck in trees (https://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/animal-rescue-incidents-attended-by-lfb)

Consumer Data Research Centre - buckets of interesting UK data including really granular estimates of fuel poverty, food insecurity, resident churn, energy efficiency of properties...

Omg a tree atlas. Hero