Cartographer

Alphons Evers

As a child, Alphons Evers used to flip through National Geographic magazines looking for maps of different parts of the world. "I’d pull them out and stare at them for hours…I loved to learn how everything was related to each other.” It wasn’t until one night, years later, that Alphons learned he could translate this love of maps into a career. "My mother was at a diner party and the lady across from her was talking about her son who loved mapping.” The woman’s son had just enrolled in the cartography program at Sir Sanford Fleming College. Alphons’s mother came home with the news and that fall Alphons was enrolled at the college.

Over eleven years later, with a B.A. in Geography and a technical diploma in Cartography, Alphons is now a GIS map producer for the Province of Ontario. He has worked on maps depicting everything from groundwater to diamond deposits. "My job is to convey as much information as possible…without putting too much [on the map itself].” Most of Alphons’s time is spent at his desk either creating preliminary maps, which are works in progress, or final maps, which are sold to the public for use. Currently, Alphons is working on a preliminary map which illustrates the sedimentary rock deposits of a certain area in the province.

Alphons’ responsibilities include ensuring the legend layout for the map is correct, applying all the colours to the map, making sure all the map’s line styles are correct, and moving text around so it is legible. He also ensures the topographic information is correct, for example making sure the lakes and mountain ranges are where they are supposed to be. "When I’m done, I give the map to an editor. We go back and forth with the map, making corrections. It may go back to the geologist who created the map to have some questions answered there.” There’s a lot of back and forth between different people before the final product is ready for public use.

The team-oriented nature of Alphons’s work does keep him very busy. But when the final map has been sent off to the printer, the work can suddenly drop-off. Alphons says one of the drawbacks of the work is that there can be a lot of downtime between mapping projects, when geologists are in the field gathering raw data for maps. However, Alphons says this is the time he uses to develop his own skills. Well aware of how important technology is to his job, Alphons often uses these periods to hone his technical skills on the office’s new cartography software. "I want to do the best I can…I think I produce a good product.”