Warnell GIS and Spatial Analysis

Just found out about this a few days ago...

The 1-meter 2009 updates to the National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) are comming online.  As of 9/9/2009, the Georgia GIS Clearinghouse has the following counties uploaded (ready for a free download).

Earlier this week, a student asked me how to create an elevation profile for the trails on their (Senior Project) client's property.  An elevation profile is a plot showing elevation across space (along a trail, road, rout, etc.) and should be fairly easy to create in ArcGIS.  All you need is a DEM, a line shapefile (your GPS'd trail), and a point shapefile. 

• Advice from someone who has been there before

• Getting started in ArcGIS
  

• Plan your GPS data collection
  

• Tips, tricks, and illusions

• Closing remarks

GIFF Data:

• GIS base data for each county in Georgia
• NAIP2007 (1-meter pixel), NAIP2006 (2-meter pixel), NAIP2005 (2-meter pixel)
• DOQQ99:  color-infrared, good for finding wet areas
• Mapped to your 'P' drive when you log into a Warnell lab computer (P:/GA/County/)
• <more>

NRCS Geospatial Data Gateway:

• NAIP imagery and other GIS data for the nation

I recently had a student email me who is interested in mapping land cover in the southeastern US for the last 30-or-so years.  He was looking for existing data for GA, AL, SC, and FL that he could use.  Locating such data for each state is a tall order, but here are some sources that may be of assistance.

There are some excellent how-to's for those of us who want-to or need-to (do something in a Linux environment). Perry Geo, for instance, has a good tutorial on how to create an Ubuntu GIS Workstation. QGIS, one of the mapping packages referenced in the article, turns out to be a pretty good linux-based mapping package, minus a very important feature - MrSID support. Lucky for us, though, there is a how-to to add MrSID support.