Spawn points correlate with the white dots of "XM matter" in Ingress. This is a system developed by Niantic which is the foundation of their games. They are generated from network traffic and I think that it's independent of maps (although mapping influence the species that spawn - water near river, etc). Don't quote me on this, but theoretically you could find spawns in areas that aren't mapped as long as there's network traffic.
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Observation spawns vs OpenStreetMap
I was in Florida about two weeks ago, staying for one night in a hotel near Orlando airport. I noticed this place had an active spawn point.
I looked at the situation in OpenStreetMap (OSM). There is absolutely no feature marked at this location. However, in Google Maps/Earth there are a few named hotels.
Apparently at this moment OSM is used for the roads, parks and river contours, but the spawns seem determined by different sources. They do seem to spawn along small paths and some water features indicated in OSM which are not in Google Maps.
I hope OSM info will be updated in Pokémon GO soon... last time was in January apparently, adding features up to mid December. I edited lots of things around my village.
Do you have similar observations?
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Answers
You can learn spawn points in your area just by observation. Even predict the time that a pokemon is going to spawn at that point. Unless they changed this, each spawn spot shows a pokemon at a specific time every hour. So if you map the points around your house for example you could know that the spot across the street is going to spawn one pokemon at 10 minutes past every hour.
Spawn points don't change their location. New spawn points can be introduced by Niantic (they usually increase them during events).
Unfortunately there are no maps for this, not even having an Ingress account. If you're interested about this topic there must be information at the silphroad Reddit. Also, the YouTuber trainer tips featured a video about this long ago.
Edit: this is the video:
https://youtu.be/iOi_lJohUg0
Be aware that much of the mechanics has changed since then. I believe that pokemon not longer spawn for only 15 minutes, 30 is the minimum currently.
