Developing Benton County topo map

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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

  1. people doing conservation and habitat restoration work
  2. 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. There is a statewide layer in FGDB format from http://gis.oregon.gov/ They also have quads. The quads I need are

44123c2 44123c3 44123c4 44123c5 44123c6 44123c7

44123d2 44123d3 44123d4 44123d5 44123d6

44123e2 44123e3 44123e4 44123e5

44123f2 44123f3 44123f4 44123f5


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. :-)

Data processing

Mosaicking DEMs

Contour generation from mosaic

Garmin map generation

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