Tag: Hartwig H. Hochmair

Spatial Measurements on USGS Topo Maps

Photo of a landscape featuring a white sand road disappearing into pine trees on the horizon. Sunbleached grass and a palm tree in the foreground, bright sun contrasts with dramatically dark sky and advancing storm clouds.

United States Geological Survey topographic maps provide a variety of geospatial measurement tools thanks to their built-in georeferencing capabilities. Georeferencing facilitates display of geographic coordinates and measurement of distances, perimeters, and areas on PDFs using the measure tools built into Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat. This 7-page fact sheet written by Hartwig H. Hochmair and published by the UF/IFAS School of Forest Resources and Conservation explains and showcases the use of these geospatial readout functions. It also provides background information about and assistance with estimating point coordinates on the Universal Transverse Mercator grid cast on USGS topographic maps as an optional layer.
https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/fr433

An Introduction to USGS Topo Maps

Photo of a landscape featuring a white sand road disappearing into pine trees on the horizon. Sunbleached grass and a palm tree in the foreground, bright sun contrasts with dramatically dark sky and advancing storm clouds.


Topographic maps provide both a detailed and accurate representation of cultural and natural features on the ground and a quantitative representation of relief, usually using contour lines. They can be used to address spatial questions in disciplines related to natural resources, hydrology, forestry, agriculture, or ecology. In 1879, the United States Geological Survey began to map the topography of the United States, producing new map versions of each area at semi-regular time intervals. US Topo maps are the current generation of USGS topographic maps. Unlike traditional topographic maps, the US Topo product is automatically generated from national map databases with topographic maps and produced every three years for all 48 of the contiguous United States, Hawaii, and the United States territories. They are published as freely available geospatial PDF documents that facilitate coordinate readings and spatial measurements (e.g. distance, area) through built-in georeferencing technology. This 7-page fact sheet written by Hartwig H. Hochmair and Adam R. Benjamin and published by the UF/IFAS School of Forest Resources and Conservation focuses on US Topo quadrangle download procedures and layer structure.
https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/fr342

An Introduction to Freely Available Street Network Data (FOR281/FR343)

Projects in agricultural and natural resource management, urban planning, and community development typically use some kind of spatial data for analysis and mapping. Applications and websites exist which allow the user to view spatial data and perform some basic spatial operations (e.g., compute the distance between two locations). This 6-page fact sheet focuses on data sources that allow users to download free street data for further processing and analysis. Written by Hartwig H. Hochmair and Dennis Zielstra, and published by the UF Department of School of Forest Resources and Conservation, March 2011.
http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/fr343