cipher - Geography at the pixel level

(enlarged version)

The answer is a group of islands.

More properly "geography and language", I suppose.

Answer

Looks like

Each section of the image is an 8-letter geographical location or adjective:
1 WOODRING: QR code
2 WATZMANN: Chappe system for semaphore telegraph
3 VICTORIA: just upside-down (and pixelated)

4 TITICACA: Arabic
5 WARUSAWA: Japanese Braille
6 WELIRANG: Morse code
7 MEDELPAD: hexadecimal ASCII
8 SURINAME: Bopomofo
9 SHERWOOD: International Phonetic Alphabet
10 THAILAND: in the negative space
11 SIHLWALD: plain text, spaced out with empty lines
12 GODAVARI: tap code
13 MONROVIA: faces of dice and mathematical operations, decoded with successive results as A1Z26

14 RIONEGRO: higher rows shifted one pixel right
15 NAGALAND: Cyrillic
16 MOLDOVAN: number the inside spaces 1-26, read off each piece as A1Z26
17 MICHIGAN: Shavian
18 SAARLAND: flag semaphore
19 DEMERARA: jigsaw puzzle
20 MANDARIN: Japanese katakana
21 MANDINKA: Moon type
22 EYREWELL: binary in negative space
23 BOTSWANA: Roman numerals in negative space (A1Z26)

24 CANBERRA: Pigpen cipher
25 FUNAFUTI: Futhark runes
26 KINGSTON: Deseret
27 WINNIPEG: each row in the box is binary
28 KIRIBATI: Hebrew
29 SINDARIN: plain text, just really small
30 BELGOROD: T-shaped "arrows" tell the direction of the next letter, and number of pixels behind them tell how far to move.
31 GISHWATI: each row has 26 spaces, read black pixels as A1Z26
32 MISSOURI: Greek

Once all of the places are found,

these fit in 8 categories, having 4 entries each:

$ \quad \bullet $ Mountains: WATZMANN, WARUSAWA, WELIRANG, WOODRING
$ \quad \bullet $ Lakes: VICTORIA, TITICACA, WINNIPEG, MICHIGAN
$ \quad \bullet $ Capital cities: MONROVIA, CANBERRA, FUNAFUTI, KINGSTON
$ \quad \bullet $ Languages: MOLDOVAN, MANDINKA, MANDARIN, SINDARIN.
$ \quad \bullet $ Forests: SHERWOOD, SIHLWALD, EYREWELL, GISHWATI
$ \quad \bullet $ Countries/sovereign states: THAILAND, SURINAME, BOTSWANA, KIRIBATI
$ \quad \bullet $ Rivers: GODAVARI, RIO NEGRO, MISSOURI, DEMERARA
$ \quad \bullet $ Provinces/territories: MEDELPAD, NAGALAND, SAARLAND, BELGOROD

Inside each category all the entries have a common letter in the same position, and no letter position is the same between any two categories. These letters spell out WINDWARD, which refers to the Windward Islands.