User:Kmusser/Sources
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Information about my sources for other GIS uses.
Contents |
[edit] Basemaps
National Atlas - For maps in the U.S. this has almost everything you need, including cities, counties, urban areas, roads, railroads, rivers, watersheds, federal lands, and native american lands.
Digital Chart of the World (DCW) - For maps outside the U.S. this has country boundaries, cities, roads, and rivers (drainage). Note this is out of date though so use with caution.
CGIAR - Has the DCW country boundaries assembled into a world coverage and updated, current except for Montenegro. Also has country administrative boundaries where they were available by public domain.
USGS - A public domain source for elevation/shaded relief data for the whole world. For relief you can also use this series on commons
[edit] Rivers
For U.S. rivers use the National Atlas. If you need more detail you can also use the National Hydrography Dataset but it's not as user friendly. Watershed names and areas can be found at USGS.
For non U.S. rivers use USGS Hydro1K which has both streams and basin boundaries. It does have a lot of mistakes though so I often use DCW or commercial atlases to check it. WRI is also a nice source to use as a check.
[edit] Metro Areas
[edit] Railroads (and roads)
North American Transportation Atlas includes U.S., Canada, and Mexico
National Transportation Atlas U.S. only, but is more detailed and up to date than the above.
[edit] Airports
Your software needs to be able to change projections and plot latitude/longitude data from a spreadsheet in order to make these maps. I use the CGIAR world boundaries as a base. Change the projection to Azimuthal equidistant (usually listed under polar projections, may be split into north polar and south polar in which case use the one for the hemisphere your airport is in). Change the center point of the projection to the latitude, longitude coordinates for your airport. Next you need to compile a spreadsheet with your destinations with coordinates for each one and the IATA code if you're going to label it. If you're going to color different airlines different colors you'll need that in there as well. An example I used for Albany is here (excel format). Coordinates can usually be found here in Wikipedia, most airport articles have them, complete with a GeoHack link that will provide them in the decimal degrees format that most GIS programs prefer. Plot and label your destinations in the GIS, labels will likely need to be adjusted by hand to prevent them from overlapping.
[edit] Formatting
I use ArcGIS for all of my maps. Maps are exported in Postscript (EPS) and converted to PNG format in Photoshop. Finishing touches and lables are often added in Photoshop as well. I have yet to find a way to convert ArcGIS maps to SVG format without the results looking awful, so my apologies to you SVG fanatics out there. If one of you has found a conversion that isn’t too labor intensive I’d be glad to hear it.
