25contender
Veteran member
- Mar 20, 2013
- 1,638
- 90
The chip is dead on. It shows these private parcels. They are well known and they are not on GE Pro.
national forest boundaries on Google earth
- Thread starter Retterath
- Start date
hoshour
Veteran member
The layers used in GE Pro or those imported from elsewhere are made up at different times by different authors. The best, most recent layers should be on the sites of the administrative districts like the forest service, but not always.
When I talked to the Idaho GIS people recently they said they were going to start migrating their files from the Idaho site to ARC/GIS. ARC/GIS is a software company that is the most popular place to go for easy use maps and layers. There are lots of others.
The whole digital mapping world is kind of an unstandardized, not terribly well organized mess and can be frustrating to search and navigate and know what is the most accurate or most up to date. ARC/GIS, run by ESRI does a very good job but you need a subscription for $1,500/year to really unlock its best features and search capabilities.
Even Google Earth Pro is just a mashup of all kinds of digital files from different sources. One thing that can help is checking out the source and date of the map or tables you run across.
When I talked to the Idaho GIS people recently they said they were going to start migrating their files from the Idaho site to ARC/GIS. ARC/GIS is a software company that is the most popular place to go for easy use maps and layers. There are lots of others.
The whole digital mapping world is kind of an unstandardized, not terribly well organized mess and can be frustrating to search and navigate and know what is the most accurate or most up to date. ARC/GIS, run by ESRI does a very good job but you need a subscription for $1,500/year to really unlock its best features and search capabilities.
Even Google Earth Pro is just a mashup of all kinds of digital files from different sources. One thing that can help is checking out the source and date of the map or tables you run across.
micropterus79
Active Member
^^^Ha! I heard that! One of the only things I miss about being a graduate student is having access to fully licensed versions of ARC/GIS software. I am hoping to land a faculty job in Denver that would give me access to a brand new GIS lab. We'll see.
What I am gathering from this thread is, while GE is handy, buying a chip is the way to go (assuming you have a GPS) if you want any to know boundaries and simple surface ownership features.
What I am gathering from this thread is, while GE is handy, buying a chip is the way to go (assuming you have a GPS) if you want any to know boundaries and simple surface ownership features.
hoshour
Veteran member
Our snowmobile club had a full ESRI suite as they offer it to nonprofits for just the annual maintenance fee. It is very easy to get caught up in grabbing data from anywhere and creating some pretty informative map databases. It was also a great communication tool between the club and the DNR - they typically have several layers of data available, heck, they even have hydrographic (bathymetric?) lake data for lakes in the wilderness. I'm going to check out the link you posted - sounds like it might be fun to get back into it.
WapitiBob
Veteran member
If you want land ownership on your GPS, easily, buy the sd card for $100.
If you want essentially the same thing on your PC, grab GE Pro, which is free, or ArcGis Explorer desktop also free, and load the Surface Ownership service provided by ESRI.
You can get the link from Geocommunicator
http://www.geocommunicator.gov/ArcGIS/rest/services/SurfaceManagementAgency/MapServer
Add this topo server:
http://www.earthpoint.us/TopoMap.aspx
add geo referenced forest visitor maps, hunt unit boundary files, vegetation, fire history, etc, etc.
If you're hunting WY, file a public info request and get the HMA and walk in data.