There are many ways to represent geographical data. Not surprisingly, maps are often involved. While maps are a compelling way to present data that can be deciphered effortlessly by most people, they can be overused. If you want to show which country has the highest percentage of forest cover, you might decide to show a globe and use color saturation to encode forest ratio. Alternatively, you could show a sorted vertical bar chart displaying the country with the highest forest cover on top and the country with the lowest at the bottom. The map version might look nicer and give your users a good intuition about locations of forest lack or riches. However, the bar chart gives a more concise overview over the distribution and country comparison of forest cover.
So, let’s assume that you have decided to use a map as the fundamental representation...