River ecologist Sukh Mantel, a senior researcher at the Institute for Water Research at Rhodes University, did not set out to create art, or even an educational tool. She was just trying to make a quick point.
After her partner sent her a cool map of rivers in the United States, she wanted to show that similar data exists for South Africa. She happened to know where the data could be found, and she also knows her way around geographical information systems, so it took her about 10 minutes to whip up her first map.
“Then I found some errors in it,” she says. Cleaning it up took another two-and-a-half hours. Read more