Degrees of Difficulty
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 […]
Driven Crazy by OneDrive
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 […]
Spatial Joins Made Easy
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 […]
Submitted for Your Reference
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, […]
Orderly Streams
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 […]
Burning the Streams
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. […]
Zones of Influence
The role of polygon zones in our lives is up for discussion with a zinger at the end. The image above should raise a number of questions. What am I doing in the middle of a busy street? for one. And what does busy Barrington Street have to do with anything? Note a subtle difference […]
Sometimes Simple Is Best
When faced with a potentially challenging task, a simple tool made it all possible. Sometimes using a simple tool can make all the difference. While working on a recent project, one of my colleagues needed some data from the River Environment Classification (REC) dataset, developed by our good friends at NIWA. This is a really useful […]
Come On Up For The Rising
With props to Bruce Springsteen, another post looking at elevation profiles. We had a tramping related post not long ago and here’s another one. Sometimes tramping is just idyllic with fantastic views, good mates and serene moments. Other times, well it’s just a plain, hard out slog of putting one foot in front of the […]
Spatial join- the tool you need
Ruby gives us some more insight into the Spatial Join tool. Spatial join: the tool you didn’t know you need (but it’s exactly what you’re are looking for). When I was completing my final project, I found that I had multiple layers with a heap of data on each, but I couldn’t really do much […]
