Anatomy of a property mapping project
You receive a request from a client who is planning for upcoming harvests. They need the following:
- Total stand acreage
- Acreage of each land cover type
- The UTM zone 17N X & Y coordinates of the three proposed logging deck sites
- Maps showing the most recent aerial and topo
Where do you start?
- Determine exactly what you need
- Locate the property (street address, Google Earth, GPS, road map, survey, etc)
- Plan/organize working directory
- Locate existing GIS data (local image and GIS layer archive, previous mapping projects)
- Compile other spatial data – imagery from NRCS, QPublic, state GIS clearinghouses
- Prepare project file geodatabase
- Import existing GIS data
- Extract imagery to FGDB
- Create new boundary and new covertype polygon feature classes and logging_deck point feature class (possibly others like interior_road, gate_entrances, stream_crossings, etc)
- Go ahead and add a gisacres (float) and gistype (text) field to boundary and covertype layer
- Add UTMx (float) and UTMy (float) fields to logging_deck layer
- Create data
- Digitize property boundary into the boundary layer
- Digitize cover types
- Copy property boundary feature (select boundary feature then right-click on boundary feature >> copy) and paste it into the covertype layer (right-click >> paste – make sure you paste into the covertype layer)
- Delineate the various cover types into the covertype layer – use the cut tool
- Attribute each polygon you cut as you go
- Digitize logging deck locations
- Populate UTMx and UTMy fields (right-click >> calculate geometry >> …)
- Generate covertype/acreage summaries
- From attribute table, right-click on type field >> Summarize >> fill in the Summarize dialog
- Generate maps