Category: mapping

Countries often choose national foods, drinks, animals, sports, and other symbols to celebrate and promote their unique identity and culture.

Then, there are plants, specifically flowers and trees. Yes, some countries have declared national flowers, like rhododendrons, roses, and orchids. Even more common are national trees, of which one stands alone, strong and powerful… kind of like an oak tree.

Let’s explore the 31 national flowers and 92 national trees of various nations.

View National flowers and trees in a full screen map

Rhododendrons, Roses, the Other 26 National Flowers

Flowers have long been used as symbols of a country’s identity and culture. When the 31 countries with national flowers made their decisions, they considered history, culture, and, of course, what was native to the nation.

Of 195 countries in the world, only 15% have declared a national flower. Yet, even still, we saw overlap in their choices: rhododendrons (3), roses (2), Lillies (2), poppies (2), and orchids (2) all were chosen by more than one country.

Rhododendrons are a symbol of resilience and strength, which may be why three countries selected them as their national flower. Nepal’s the Rhododendron arboreum, while both the Emirate of Caucasus and Kashmiristan choose the Rhododendron ponticum to represent them.

Roses are another popular choice for national flowers. Both England and the Maldives have selected types of roses for their national flower: the Tudor rose (an emblem) and Pink rose, respectively. Despite their names, neither South Korea’s Rose of Sharon nor Chile’s Lapageria rosea are roses. Like the rose, orchids are the national flower of two nations: Sikkim (Noble orchid) and Singapore (Orchid).

Meanwhile, lilies symbolize purity, innocence, and tranquility. You might think this makes them a popular national flower choice. While Sri Lanka’s Water Lily and Finland’s Lily of the Valley suggest this, the Lily of the Valley is a bit of a misnomer—it’s actually part of the asparagus family. Only Sri Lanka is truly represented by this particular type of flower.

Check out the rest of the national flowers on the map. Enjoy the simplicity of the Tiaré Flower (Cook Islands) or the bright bloom of Samoa’s Red ginger before moving on to national trees…

National Trees Are Overwhelmingly Oak

Far more nations have designated national trees (92) than flowers (31). Also unlike national flowers, there’s a very common national tree: Oaks (18). Even so, there’s more than one Oak variety for nations to choose as their national tree.

National tree common name	#	Countries
Oak, Pedunculate oak	12	Belarus*, Croatia, Denmark, England, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Serbia, United Kingdom
Oak	2	Germany, United States
Sessile oak	2	Ireland, Wales
Cork oak	1	Portugal
Golden oak	1	Cyprus

The Pedunculate oak is the national tree of 11 countries—12 if you count Belarus, for which it is unofficial. All 12 are located throughout Europe, where this type of oak is native (it’s often referred to as the English oak or European oak).

However, not every European country is represented by the Pedunculate oak. Ireland and Wales’ national tree is the Sessile oak. Portugal has its Cork oak and geographically-Western-Asia yet culturally Southeastern European Cyprus chose the Golden oak. Meanwhile, Germany (and the U.S., though it’s decidedly not a European country) selected plain old oaks.

Palms, pines, and olive trees are also popular trees, as you can see in the table. You’ll find them all on the map… along with photos of each national flower or tree.

Display Images on Your Map

You may have noticed the thumbnail images we’ve included in this map, something you can do with your own BatchGeo custom map.

An image is worth a thousand words. That’s why we made it easy to include logos, icons, photos, or other imagery in your map itself.

Here’s how to do it:

1. First, you’ll want to check that your images are small, not more than 150 pixels in either direction.
2. Next, you’ll need to either upload your images somewhere, such as a blog or image provider, or pull in images that are already hosted online, like from Wikipedia (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/ca/Phoenix_dactylifera100_4209.JPG/90px-Phoenix_dactylifera100_4209.JPG).
3. In your spreadsheet, create a separate column for your images, with a heading like “Images.” You can include a single image for every location.
4. Add the URL for every image you want to include in that column.

Then, map your data, as usual, using our free mapping tool. You’ll be able to select the spreadsheet’s “Image” column when you “Show Advanced Options,” if BatchGeo doesn’t discover it automatically.

One note on hosted images: Sometimes Wikipedia or other sites will remove an image or restrict its access. To avoid this, you’ll want to host map images on Dropbox or a similar cloud image service.

About half of people would rather stay inside alone than attend a jam-packed event. While most of these people don’t fear death, it’s one of the risks when you are with hundreds or thousands of others. We’ve morbidly gathered more than 193 crowd collapses and crushes that have occurred throughout the centuries. More often than not, these incidents result in an unimaginable loss of life. Yet we still understand very little about these tragic events.

A common misconception is that crowd crushes occur due to the size of a crowd. Their true cause is too dense of a crowd (more than four to five people per square meter). In such cases, the pressure on each individual causes the crowd to collapse in on itself, or become so densely packed that individuals are crushed and asphyxiated.

Most agree the fault lies with poor event organization, and the major crowd disasters of the past could have been prevented by simple crowd management strategies. Nevertheless, these incidents continue to happen at large gatherings such as religious, sporting, musical, or other events.

So let’s take a look at some of the deadliest crowd crushes ever recorded. While the causes and circumstances for gathering do vary, their commonalities may be able to help us better understand these tragic events.

View Fatal crowd crushes in a full screen map

The 10 Deadliest Crowd Crushes

Of the 193 fatal crowd crushes on the map, several have death tolls that far surpass the rest. Each of the following 10 crowd crushes resulted in the deaths of more than 340 people:

• 2015 Mina stampede: 2,400+ estimated deaths
• 1990 Mecca tunnel tragedy: 1,426
• Khodynka Tragedy: 1,389
• 2005 Al-Aimmah Bridge disaster: 953
• 1954 Prayag Kumbh Mela stampede: 500-800
• Iroquois Theatre fire: 602
• Chongqing tunnel massacre: 461
• Unnamed: 354
• Phnom Penh stampede: 347
• 2006 Hajj stampede: 345

When it comes to the timing of these unfortunate events, four of the ten deadliest have already occurred this century—even though it’s not even half over. With five total incidents having occurred throughout the 1900s, we’re likely to face more crowd crushes in the next decades than ever before.

Location-wise, Saudi Arabia has been home to the highest number of incidents, with three of the top ten tragedies occurring in the country. More than this, however, is the fact that all three of the Saudi Arabian crowd crushes took place in the same city: Mina. Notably, all of these were religious-type gatherings.

The 15 Reasons for Gathering Before a Crush

The 10 deadliest crowd crushes aren’t the only takeaway from the map. The reasons for each gathering that resulted in a crush are worth diving into.

Crowd Crush Gathering Type	No.
Religion	42
Sports	36
Concert or Festival	23
Other Recreation	16
Holiday	13
Funeral	11
Nightclub	10
School	9
Politics	9
Aid	9
Military	6
Transportation	3
Shopping	2
Other	2
Execution	2

As you can see from the table above (and on the map when you group by “​​Gathering Type”), religion and sports events are the most common reasons for gathering before a fatal crowd crush, with 42 and 36 incidents respectively.

The deadliest religious-related crowd crushes include the previously mentioned #1 deadliest crush overall, the 2015 Mina stampede. Meanwhile, the Lima, Peru Estadio Nacional disaster is the sports-related crowd crush that saw the most people die (328 estimated deaths).

Concerts or festivals are the third most common reason for gathering before a crowd crush, while other recreation, holiday, and funeral events also had a significant number of incidents, with 16, 13, and 11 incidents respectively.

Nightclubs, schools, politics, and aid-related events had fewer incidents but still accounted for a non-negligible number of fatal crowd crushes. Military and transportation events had the lowest number of incidents, with 6 and 3 respectively. Shopping events and other types of gatherings had only 2 reported incidents each. Finally, there were 2 incidents reported as executions, which is a particularly disturbing finding.

Note that we manually assigned each incident a type—and there is the potential for overlap. For example, a crowd crush during a NYE concert could be classified as both a concert and holiday. Regardless, types can be especially helpful when you map your data with a tool that groups together your data types.

Why You Should Assign Types or Categories to Your Data

For certain kinds of data—even those entirely pulled from an outside source—there is the opportunity to improve your insights by assigning types or categories.

This could be anything from types of gatherings before a crowd crush, as discussed in the previous section, or even reasons for crush, from fires to police instigation.

Not only can this be helpful when viewing your spreadsheet (you can create filters to only show specific data types in Google Sheets, for example), but also when mapping.

These type or category columns will be suggested for grouping, along with other columns in your spreadsheet that may be useful. You and other users of your map will be able to select only the markers that meet certain requirements, filtering out the rest. Groups can be combined to zero in on very specific results, giving you insight into the story behind the map.

Get started today at batchgeo.com.

We love our obscure celebrations in the United States. Often, these are local events of much note, and we’ve gathered a bunch of them for you on a map.

Yet the 182 festivals that take place each year across the U.S. aren’t very easily defined. Not to stop us from trying to put them into categories or types. These range from arts and crafts festivals to transportation festivals. The two most common festival types include 64 individual events across the country—and there are some pretty spectacular individual events within each type (Sawdust Art Festival, anyone?), as you’ll see on the map below.

View U.S. Festivals in a full screen map

The Two Most Common Festival Types

By far, the two most popular kinds are 1. food, harvest, and wild game and 2. culture, heritage, and folk festivals. While certainly not exhaustive, Wikipedia reports that 32 celebrations in the U.S. fall into each of these two categories, so let’s take a look at some individual examples of these festival types.

Food, Harvest, and Wild Game Festivals

The food, harvest, and wild game festival type is pretty self-explanatory. Six such events occur each year in Ohio:

• Banana Split Festival (Wilmington, Ohio)
• Pumpkin Festival (Barnesville)
• Pumpkin Show (Circleville)
• Festival of the Fish (Vermilion)
• County Apple Festival (Jackson)
• Sweet Corn Festival (Fairborn)

Ohio certainly loves its pumpkins—though it’s not the only state with pumpkin-themed events. California’s Half Moon Bay hosts a Half Moon Bay Art and Pumpkin Festival, along with two more events that fall into the food, harvest, and wild game festival category. The Morton Pumpkin Festival also happens each year in Illinois, in addition to another festival of this type. As for where the largest pumpkins of all time are grown, check out our post on the topic.

On the same note, five food, harvest, and wild game festivals take place in North Carolina while two are held in Louisiana, Texas, and New York, including two in the same city: the National Buffalo Wing Festival and Taste of Buffalo, which we assume involves either multiple cuisines prominent in the city or the animal.

Festivals of Culture, Heritage, and Folk

As for the other most common type of festival, Texas is home to the most culture, heritage, and folk festivals (four). Borderfest is the largest and oldest music festival in South Texas, held each year in the Rio Grande Valley.

Meanwhile, Dallas hosts two festivals of this type: a Greek Food Festival and the North Texas Irish Festival. Dallas’s Irish Festival may be the second oldest Irish festival in the country, but it’s far from the only one held in the U.S. There’s also the Riverfront Irish Festival in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio and the Dublin Irish Festival—also in the Buckeye State. Plus, the capital of Indiana throws an Indy Irish Festival while the Kansas City Irish Fest takes place in Kansas City, Missouri.

Last for Texas is the Texas Folklife Festival, which comes around each year in San Antonio.

To see Ohio’s third festival that doesn’t fall into this category, click through the map. Otherwise, we’re moving on to the rest of the festival types.

How to Analyze the Other 19 U.S. Festival Types

You know about the two most common festival types in the U.S. But with 182 total festivals, food, harvest, and wild game festivals and culture, heritage, and folk festivals certainly aren’t the only types.

Festival type	No. of festivals
Food, harvest and wild game festivals	32
Culture, heritage and folk festivals	32
Fine art and theatre festivals	21
Arts and crafts festivals	17
Flower festivals	11
Celebration/talk festivity	10
Alternative festivals	10
LGBT festivals	9
Seasonal festivals	7
Contemporary Christian Festivals	5
Holiday festivals	4
Storytelling festivals	3
Rodeo and horse racing festivals	3
Religious festivals	3
Pioneer festivals	3
Pagan festivals	3
Beer festivals	3
Sports festivals	2
Science festivals	2
Transportation festivals	1
Innovation festivals	1

Tables like the one above are great for displaying your data. But when you want to analyze the same information, there are far better tools, including those that map your data.

Many mapping software options enable you to plot your points, such as ArcGIS and other desktop GIS software, Google Maps API, and web-based mapping tools.

But fewer offer the ability to group your data. When you map your data, you typically have more information than just location. This is why BatchGeo enables you and other users of your map to select only the markers that meet certain requirements, filtering out the rest. Groups can be combined to zero in on very specific results, giving you insight into the story behind the map.

Get started for free at batchgeo.com.