Mapping The Heartwood Region
While just nascent at the moment, we have big plans to begin using the available tool of online maps, and even adding some new capabilities through custom programming.
As of it's launch, our new website offers a few web-based maps, using Google Maps as our base platform:
- This page and the home page show the "physical map" view of our region
- The Forest Protection landing page uses a KML layer and some custom information to show the names of the National Forests in our region and links to some of the Heartwood member organizations.
- Look at the location and get driving directions to this year's Heartwood Forest Council through the Directions page.
We'd love to have your help with this proeject! To volunteer with the mapping project, or anything else for our website, please contact our webmaster: Here is a partial list of ways we could use help with the mapping project:
- getting a copy of all the data sets we currently have, looking at them in ARCwhatever and putting together a catalogue of what we have which non-GIS people could understand.
- converting these layers to KML & data tables
- finding more useful data sets online & adding them to our catalogue
- asking the public land management agencies Heartwwod works with to get GIS layers, ie forest stand maps from the forest service.
- opening conversations with other enviro groups who may have data sets they are willing to share
- searching for existing open source tools for manipulating and saving KML which we may be able to use or build from
- script writing to manipulate / build interactivity into our Google Maps/KML based system
- helping us write grants and raise funds to support the work