8 March 07

Treasure Under The Basement

The treasure map The 1930s was an era when labor was quite available and many public projects got started that called for a lot of handwork. This held true in the field of natural resource management as well as at large. In California, a forester named Albert E. Wieslander began a U.S. Forest Service project to map the vegetation of California. Many teams of botanists hiked ridgeline to ridgeline, pausing to gaze out over the landscape and mark in colored pencil on 30’ USGS quadrangle maps the vegetation patterns they saw. Only a few of these vegetation maps were ever published, and the set of well over a hundred hand-drawn maps of about 40% of the state lay forgotten.

The set of maps was nearly thrown out on two different occasions, when in the 1980s they were rescued by a professor at UC Berkeley and started to be curated and put to use. They are incredibly valuable from the point of view of historical ecology, giving a view of the vegetation of the state 75 years ago. A number of people have been working on the project of digitizing the Wieslander data, including my officemate Jim Thorne who is leading the effort to create GIS data from scans of the original maps.

The Wieslander map set was complete for the Sierra Nevada mountain range except for the Lake Tahoe basin area, where the hand-drawn maps had gone missing for a decade or more. These maps resurfaced Saturday.

Jim had been in touch with an emeritus professor at UC Berkeley by the name of Paul Zinke, who was one of the botanists employed by Wieslander, and was well in his 80s. Jim hoped that the oral history program at Berkeley would interview him, but sadly he died last year before the interview could take place. Jim then got in contact with Zinke’s son Michael, and after a while arranged with him to browse through some of Zinke’s papers. Last weekend, in a crawl space under the basement floor, they struck paydirt. The missing maps were there.

Above is a photo of the happy discoverers — Michael, Sarah, and Jim left to right.

Posted by at 10:40 PM in Maps | Link | Comment [1]

13 December 06

Everydot

Everydot shows one person’s quest to photograph all the dots on the map in his neck of the woods around Minnesota and North Dakota, even sleepy crossroads like Henderson Station, Minnesota.

Posted by at 09:54 PM in Nature and Place | Link | Comment [2]

11 December 06

Mapping Food Coops

Food co-ops of the continental US
I’ve wanted to know where all the food coops are in the United States for some time so I made a map, shown here at left. To do this I screenscaped the addresses for all the food coops in the Cooperative Grocer Directory and then used the functionality at geocoder.us to change the addresses into latitudes and longitudes which I could then plot on a map. This is still a draft map: my first pass at geocoding only got about 80% of the food coops located (about 220 of them). Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Vermont win the prize for the most cooperative states.

Posted by at 06:54 PM in Maps | Link | Comment [4]

20 July 06

Triangulating San Francisco

This week I’ve been taking a class at the San Francisco Center for the Book entitled “Mapping as a Creative Strategy”. The first half of the class was a look at traditions of mapping, including a field trip to the maritime library at the National Maritime Historical Park to look at many old maps of the California coast, North America, and San Francisco Bay. This latter half we’ve been working on our own projects. Most of the other students are San Francisco residents, and it was interesting for me to try to work with the perspective of being a visitor to the city, and not being intimately familiar with its neighborhoods.

I started out by making a list of the dozen places I’ve been to in San Francisco these past few years, and penciled these in on my street map. One of the themes that came up in discussion was making a map of places you’ve never been. So I came up with the idea of triangulating several of these places to wind up in spots I’ve never been before. The familiar landmarks were the San Francisco Center for the Book, the S.F. Public Library, the Maritime Library, and the Sutro Library (a bookish selection, to be sure). Finding the midpoints between these landmarks, I came up with a set of 4 new locations to go to.

Today I did my grand tour of the city. At each stop I made a sketch on bristol board. I started out north of the Civic Center, headed west to Haight and Lyon, circled Buena Vista Park to Roosevelt Way, then wound up at Noe and 20th. It was a long outing, but it was wonderful to explore the city this way!

Posted by at 07:49 PM in Maps | Link | Comment [1]

6 July 06

Google Earth Meets The Tour

L'Alpe d'Huez in Google Earth Following the Tour de France has taken a second seat next to the World Cup, but as the latter is almost over, we will begin paying more attention. At this point, nobody has any idea who might win the Tour, the favorites all being out due to drug scandal or injury. Right now, the sprinters are having their time in the sun. Today I looked at the official Tour website to see when we’ll be hitting more decisive stages. There I found that they’ve produced a Tour de France overlay for Google Earth. I don’t remember if they did this last year—Google Earth didn’t run on my computer then. At left is a Google Earth image (click to enlarge) of the famous climb up L’Alpe d’Huez, which is on Tuesday 18 July.

Posted by at 08:38 PM in Bicycling | Link | Comment

9 May 06

Middle Earth Pixel-By-Pixel

In geospatial parlance, a DEM, or digital elevation model, is a gridded map showing the elevation in each grid cell across a region. Some enterprising souls, not content with mapping areas close to home, have started making a DEM of Middle Earth. I’ll start worrying when they succeed in finding matching satellite imagery! (From The Map Room).

Posted by at 10:49 PM in Maps | Link | Comment

4 May 06

Freeing The Isle of Wight

About the only way I think of that the United States is more socialistic than the rest of the world is that information collected by the federal government generally gets placed into the public domain. This policy has had a happy consequence that there are a lot of map products and map data available free to the public. These include digital versions of the topographic map series produced by the USGS, as well as the street mapping used by the Census Bureau in the course of their work.

Most countries are not so fortunate, and map data collected by the government survey agency at public expense gets sold back to users, often at a considerable price. This situation has led to a movement to make publically collected data freely available. A workaround until this practice is changed is to start making one’s own maps, and a number of mapping enthusiasts are taking this route.

One such project is the OpenStreetMap. To contribute to this map, people go out with recreational GPS units and trace out streets, paths, and trails and submit their coordinates to the online map. This weekend the OpenStreetMap folks are going to free the Isle of Wight. Some 30 volunteers from all around Europe are converging on the 381 square kilometer island to travel all its roads and footpaths and will make the resulting map freely available to the public.

(Via The Map Room)

Posted by at 10:31 PM in Maps | Link | Comment

19 April 06

Mapping Religion In America

Since the Census Bureau does not collect information on religion, it is often hard to find information on religious affiliation across the United States. The Glenmary Research Center several years ago published a study of religious congregations and membership, and the patterns from this dataset are mapped here as part of a course on the cultural geography of United States and Canada.

(From Slashgeo.)

Posted by at 09:37 PM in Maps | Link | Comment

28 March 06

Maps For The Sky

Judging from the date on the map, sometime in 1976 I acquired a 1:1,000,000 scale world aeronautical chart covering California and the Southwest. (This was probably at a stop at the long since closed Nut Tree, which was a popular roadside restaurant off of I-80 in Vacaville. It was next to an airport and also sold aviation goodies). Aeronautical charts are great fun to look at, but I don’t have any others. But now there’s a site that lets you browse aeronautical charts online—SkyVector.com. It’s good for planning imaginary flights!

(From The Map Room.)

Posted by at 09:16 PM in Maps | Link | Comment [2]

12 March 06

Tracking Sea Critters

The OBIS-SEAMAP site is a repository for observation and tracking data for marine mammals, sea turtles, and seabirds. What is neat is that the site lets anyone go in and look at maps of the observation data, so if you want to see where a short-tailed albatross can cruise to, you can.

Posted by at 10:26 PM in Maps | Link | Comment [1]

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