Why Use a Topo?

In an effort to make my own forest layers...
A topographic map is a map that depicts the features of a place ('Topo' greek for 'place') in a graphic way for the purpose of understanding more about that place. For ecological sciences, knowing where forests are is important information when trying to understand the ecology of a place.

Why use a pre-made Topo layer when you have access to many of the individual geographic features?
Have you seen a Topo map before. They are complex maps, with roads, names of places, natural features, and so on. It can be challenging to make Topo maps. Even if you have the all the data to to make a good Topo map, the companies that make Topos will still have information that I fail to have, I don't know where they get some of this stuff.

I've developed is forested regions. I was missing a crucial part of the landscape in Topo maps that I make--the Forest Layer.



'Pre-Made' Topo With Forest vs. My Topo Forest Layer:

I took satellite imagery, ran an Unsupervised classification (ISO cluster; Maximum Likelihood Classification), kept only the cells that were of a 'Forest' class. One thing I could do to improve this representation is to 'Generalize' the raster; to try to remove some of the 'Graininess/Pixelation'. Looks great on the map that I printed for our Black Footed Ferret Research Group. It makes a lot of sense when comparing it to the presence/absence layer of the Prairie Dog population too! Now to take this forest layer and compare it with of Pronghorn population data!

Where the Big Horn At?

We're doing some research on Big Horn Sheep this summer; and part of that work is to put up motion activated cameras at our water catchments. But before we jump into the wilderness we wanted to decide which locations would provide us with images we are looking for.

I present,

'Water Catchments, Cameras, Sheep!'

What I really like about this map is there is very few layers that are used. Layers needed include selected and and buffered slopes greater that 60% (sheep escape terrain), find the Federal 'Wilderness' data layer for the region, and waters for the survey area. Easy! Now were going to sit down and figure out the best place to put up our cameras. I wanted to get this map out quickly, so the legend does lack those finishing touches of a production grade map--but my layouts are getting cleaner!

Data Management via Maps

Government data can get pretty messy. I know, Its hard to believe; with all the projects, novice GIS users, and employment turn-over putting all the messy data to use can be hard. Yet, a good way to get my feet wet with the data is make maps--and do some cleaning house as I go.

First up,

'Juniper Tree Management on Ranch Lands'.

Alright, I'll admit it, this topographic map doesn't show juniper tree management; what happened was while I was cleaning house, improving our data collection of ranches and juniper thinning, I was asked to produce a map for a rancher (as a good gesture for him allowing us access to his property). At the very moment I was done being a good citizen and compiling 10+ layers of random ranch layer, I was asked to produce this map, my first for the department.

The key to quickly producing this topo was spending the time to clean up the data! For me, the most important part of this story is the journey.

'Ranch Topology'

In addition to spatially joining the ranch layers, and the consequent deleting of the unnecessary fields, I then performed a topological check to be sure their was no overlapping polygons nor any gaps. I do, however, have a lot to learn with topology--but a lot less after making this map.

Lets get cartographic

When people think of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) they think 'Maps'. Mostly, I think of geographic data management, development, and analysis. But 'what the people wants people gets'.

Now, working at Arizona Department of Game and Fish it is more important than ever to produce quality maps that our Game Wardens can bring with them in their trucks and our policy makers can use to make those all important connections from the data.

So, in the next few posts I will be bringing you the maps I've produced (well, at least the quality pieces).