Developing Benton County topo map
I am in the #Data Collection stage currently.
Overview
About a year ago I did a volunteer "let's GPS the weeds" day and was dejected to find the Benton County Soil and Water people have a dozen or so Garmin eTrexes with NO MAPS in them! They cannot afford to waste money on Garmin maps.
So I decided to create topo maps for them that are BETTER THAN GARMIN'S.
What do you think? Can I do it?
That's what this is all about.
Intended users
- people doing conservation and habitat restoration work
- hikers and mountain bikers
Desired features
- Contours
- Roads: county, McDonald/Dunn forests
- Parks: federal, state, county, city
- Trails in parks
- Land cover- major vegetation polygons
- Hydro- creeks, rivers, ponds, lakes
Data Collection
Elevations
I want to try to develop a contour layer using DEMs.
I have LiDAR for eastern part of Benton County. (DoGAMI data which I got from Benton County GIS by special request) Great data but does not cover entire county, so I need to do some mosaicking.
According to DoGAMI, the western half of the county will be available eventually, at that time I will start over again! For now I consider it just part of the challenge.
Until then I will supplement the LiDAR with other DEM raster data at a lower resolution.
As with the Benton county data, some of the Corvallis data was downloaded from their web site, and some provided directly upon request.
I have various existing contour layers too which I can use for comparisons.
Loading data into PostGIS
Because I am pretty much obsessed with PostGIS right now, I will be loading all vector data into it. I will do raster processing outside of PostGIS, at least for now.
Previewing data
I will use QGIS to build a test map,
I will use Mapnik too as soon as I learn what for. :-)
