Stemilt Partnership

For the past several months I've been working with the Trust for Public Land on the Stemilt-Squilchuck Community Vision. Our client is Chelan County, and we've been working closely with a large citizen group known as the Stemilt Partnership. This photo was taken just after our most recent Partnership meeting last Wednesday at the Malaga Fire Hall. The project started in response to a proposed land exchange in which the Washington Department of Natural Resources was planning to divest itself of four sections in the upper part of the basin. As it happens, these four sections form the central core of many of the land use and land management activities that affect the entire watershed. The Partnership was formed to help the County determine what should happen with the land in light of all of the stakeholder groups that are using these public lands.

This project has been particularly interesting for me to work on, because it contains all of the elements that I really love about my job--interesting data and modeling challenges, lots of cartography, the opportunity to meet with and learn from a wide range of citizens and agency people (farmers, real estate developers, wildlife biologists, policy wonks, etc), public speaking and lots of travel to the watershed. The timeline is fairly compact for a project of this size and complexity, but I think the fact that so many community members are heavily engaged will help us produce an excellent result.

Chuckanut Mountains Park District Map

I recently completed work on a map for the Chuckanut Mountains Park District. This was a quick, fun project I did for Ken Wilcox and the other folks involved in establishing a more coherent and comprehensive land management approach for this unique region. The Chuckanut Mountains are the only place where the Cascade foothills come all the way to salt water.

The map shows 2006 NRCS NAIP 1 m color orthophotography, major public land owners (derived from the Snohomish and Skagit County parcel databases), as well as all private parcels 10 acres or larger in size.

I wish the CMPD well, and I hope this large poster (40" x 60") is helpful in accomplishing their mission.

Mauritius--A Projection Challenge

Recently, I was asked by one of my clients to project a bunch of data for the island nation of Mauritius in preparation for some wetlands-related field work they will be doing there. They received the data from the national government, and there was no projection information included with the data.

As it turns out, Mauritius has its own grid, which is independent from all other geographic coordinate systems and is not natively supported by ArcMap. According to a map I found on the Government of Mauritius web site, the projection is as follows:

Grid : Mauritius
Projection : Lambert Conical Orthomorphic
Spheroid : Clarke 1880
Unit Of Measurement : Metre
Longitude of origin : 57°31'18.58" East of Greenwich
Latitude of Origin : 20°11'42.25" South
Scale Factor at Origin : Unity
False Co-ordinates of origin : 1,000,000m Easting
1,000,000m Northing

Unfortunately, Lambert Conical Orthomorphic is not available in ArcMap, but through my research I determined that Lambert Conformal Conic is a very close approximation. So, converting the above description into ESRI lingo, it looks something like this:

Projected Coordinate System: Mauritius
Projection: Lambert_Conformal_Conic
False_Easting: 1000000.00000000
False_Northing: 1000000.00000000
Central_Meridian: 57.52183000
Standard_Parallel_1: -20.19507000
Standard_Parallel_2: -20.19507000
Scale_Factor: 1.0
Latitude_Of_Origin: -20.19507000
Linear Unit: Meter

I punted on the Standard Parallels, assuming that the island is small enough for the latitude of origin to suffice for both parallels. This sort of worked, and I placed the GTOPO global DEM in the map frame with the newly projected data, resulting in the first image. Seems close, but a bit hard to tell.

So I downloaded SRTM data for the island, which has much higher resolution than GTOPO, and the result is the second image. Clearly, pretty far off. At this point, I was getting in over my head with respect to creating custom datum/spheroid combinations, so I called the good folks at ESRI and after an hour on the phone, they helped me to build a very solid projection and transformation for Mauritius (this is the actual PRJ file, please feel free to use it, just remove the carriage returns after each comma before saving as a PRJ):

PROJCS["Mauritius_lambert",
GEOGCS["Mauritius",
DATUM["",
SPHEROID["Clarke_1880_RGS",6378249.145,293.465]],
PRIMEM["Greenwich",0.0],
UNIT["Degree",0.0174532925199433]],
PROJECTION["Lambert_Conformal_Conic"],
PARAMETER["False_Easting",1000000.0],
PARAMETER["False_Northing",1000000.0],
PARAMETER["Central_Meridian",57.52182777777779],
PARAMETER["Standard_Parallel_1",-20.19506944444445],
PARAMETER["Standard_Parallel_2",-20.19506944444445],
PARAMETER["Latitude_Of_Origin",-20.19506944444445],
UNIT["Meter",1.0]]

The custom datum comes from the Le_Pouce_1934_TO_WGS_1984 transformation ESRI helped me to create, which is here (again, remove CR after commas, save as a gtf file):

GEOGTRAN["Le_Pouce_1934_TO_WGS_1984",
GEOGCS["Mauritius",DATUM["",
SPHEROID["Clarke_1880_RGS",6378249.145,293.465]],
PRIMEM["Greenwich",0.0],UNIT["Degree",0.0174532925199433]],
GEOGCS["GCS_WGS_1984",DATUM["D_WGS_1984",
SPHEROID["WGS_1984",6378137.0,298.257223563]],
PRIMEM["Greenwich",0.0],UNIT["Degree",0.0174532925199433]],
METHOD["Geocentric_Translation"],
PARAMETER["X_Axis_Translation",-770.1],
PARAMETER["Y_Axis_Translation",158.4],
PARAMETER["Z_Axis_Translation",-498.2]]

The result is a very nice agreement between the red coastline vector and the SRTM topography, shown in the third image.

Alpine Lakes Wilderness Additions Introduced in Congress

We recently completed work with The Wilderness Society, the Alpine Lakes Protection Society, and Congressman Dave Reichert's office to map proposed additions to the Alpine Lakes Wilderness Area. The proposal also includes the designation of the Pratt River as a wild river. One of the CORE GIS maps produced in this effort is featured in the photo of Congressman Reichert announcing the legislation. Hopefully this bill will get signed into law!

Excellent Source for Historic Census Data and GIS Files

I am currently working on a project for The Trust for Public Land in the North Coast of Oregon, part of which involves an analysis of development patterns and trends. In working up numbers for population and housing units, I came upon an excellent source for historic U.S. Census data, the National Historical Geographic Information System. They provide access to the complete Census database for all of the decennial censuses back to 1970, as well as geographic boundary files for mapping the data. So far it has proven to be quite a goldmine!

Wenatchee Watershed Vision is Available for Download

The Trust for Public Land recently released the Wenatchee Watershed Vision. According to the website, this document "lays out a bold vision - one that will require broad coalitions, strategic partnerships, and community initiative to be successful. TPL hopes the Wenatchee Watershed Vision will inspire community action to protect the special places and character of a landscape so many people love."

The GIS analysis for this project was started at CommEn Space and finished at CORE GIS. We also did the report layout and graphic design, which was a fun and slightly different challenge. The report and the maps produced for the report can both be downloaded here.

Measure 37 Maps are Available on Sightline's Daily Score

CORE GIS recently completed work on a series of maps and analyses of Measure 37 Claims in Oregon. There is a map of the Portland Metro Region, the Central Willamette, Hood River and Wasco Counties, and the Hood River Valley. Eric de Place has some excellent analysis and commentary on the numbers we generated for Sightline.