It’s been a very busy start to the semester here at the GIS Gizmoplex. In our quest for world domination, er, no, fame and fortune, nope, okay, better integration of GIS into courses, we’ve been working on ways for students to use GIS as part of their coursework. It’s been great working with some of […]
Ah, Monday morning… One message in the inbox this morning brought up a classic GIS workflow. How do I take potentially useful information in something like a PDF and add it to a map? This brings us to georeferencing and digitising. As an example of that, we’ve been working with Peter Almond to put together […]
We dissect how to approach a challenging spatial problem by relying on some basic levels of analysis. We often get a lot of challenging problems of a spatial nature here in the GIS world. A common thread of these is that they often sound easy at the start but get much more complicated when you […]
In this post we resolve the problem with our US data points In a previous post we looked in excruciating detail at some point data in the US. After first establishing that many, if not all, were in the wrong place, the next step was figuring out how to fix this, which meant getting to […]
To work through a mapping project a bit of detective work was needed to get data in the right place. GIS Central has recently been involved with some global mapping as part of an Our Land and Water project. This has involved collating a wide range of environmental data covering soils, hydrology, vegetation, terrain and […]
Avoid losing precious data by practicing some Zen calm Here are GIS Central we’ve been fielding a lot of calls from frustrated users, along the lines of: “I finished my project last night but when I opened it up this morning, everything was gone!” -Frustrated in Whangarei “That layer I spent hours on doesn’t work […]
We cover a quick and easy way to do temporary spatial joins When we opened up the mail bag here at GIS Central recently, out popped a request from a colleague: “Do we have a mapping table of LAWA monitoring site names to the regional council site names?” Perhaps I should decode this a bit […]
Setting the reference scale for you maps can make symbology more consistent across scales. Here at GIS Central we’ve been gearing up for some work on Lake Heron Station in near Mt Somers: As a start I thought I would pull together some of the already available data for this project, things like the LCDB, […]
Stream order is a way to categorise river reaches by size. In this post we see how to add stream orders to a derived stream network. As the temperatures warm up, the tramping season has already gotten underway in our house so keen daughter Islay recently dragged me up the short but steep track to Carroll Hut […]
Here we talk about how GIS can be used to create catchment boundaries and river lines from elevation data. Far be it from a surface water person like me to advocate for burning streams in any way (we’re not talking about the Cuyahoga River here), but in a geospatial sense it can be a good thing. […]