Jörg Stadelbauer · 2018
This review examines the 2018 English National Atlas of Georgia, a comprehensive revision of the 2012 Georgian edition produced through cooperation between geography institutes in Tbilisi and Giessen. It describes extensive physical-geographical coverage alongside population, economy, religion and historical maps, with demographic information incorporating the 2014 census and updates to 2016. The reviewer particularly values the soil legend’s pairing of traditional Russian-derived and international terminology and the maps documenting natural hazards, endemic species and population decline. Socio-economic coverage is limited by the availability of published regional data; Abkhazia and South Ossetia are largely excluded from these maps, while a map of the secession areas and internally displaced persons addresses their political context. Suggested improvements include additional socio-economic and historical maps, fuller city-map labels and an updated agricultural map inherited largely unchanged from 1964. The reviewer also identifies unexplained scoring and missing data reference dates, but judges these shortcomings minor in relation to the atlas’s cartographic and editorial quality and considers its price reasonable.
