BTAA-GIN Collection Stories

By Jay Bowen - GIS Specialist, The Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio, The University of Iowa Libraries  The BTAA Geoportal has a wealth of interesting and beautiful historic scanned maps available to the public to download. Recently, I discovered John Henry Renshawe's shaded relief maps of US national parks from the early 1900s. Using his Panoramic View of the Yosemite National Park, California from 1914, I wanted to demonstrate an open-source technique for adding three dimensionality to these fantastic relief maps. Download and Georeference the JPG File The first step is to download the map here and load it into a georeferencer tool in your favorite GIS software. While I find georeferencing in ArcGIS Pro to be an intuitive breeze, I used the Georeferencer tool in QGIS to keep with an open-source and MacOS-oriented workflow. You can do a lot of amazing GIS work in the comfort of your home with a MacBook! As shown in the screenshot above, I rubbersheeted the ...

Data-Driven ArcGIS StoryMaps How to Create a Story Map by Batch Attaching Media to Points Using ArcGIS StoryMaps By Jay Bowen, University of Iowa Libraries Tags: ArcGIS StoryMaps, data-driven, map tour, batch attachment, images, spreadsheet, csv Overview There are a lot of questions on the GIS Q&A sites about how to create a story map from a spreadsheet of point data with images using the newer version of ArcGIS StoryMaps , but very few answers. If you are like me, you liked how Esri's Classic Story Maps allowed you to upload an entire csv of points with image urls to create a data-driven story map in one quick step without having to do this point-by-point. You may have agonized over this process in the newer version and you might be unaware that, by implementing a few extra steps using ArcGIS Desktop, you can also do this with the newer version. In the post that follows, I will walk you through the steps involved so that you can create a data-driven tour in ArcGIS StoryMaps u...

By Kathleen Weessies Simple quiet country life sounds idyllic and peaceful for anyone fed up with the complications of modern society. But folks in the country see the limits to that charm: They want to stream shows, shop, and work online from home just like anyone else.    People in rural areas want broadband internet yesterday. Connectivity is surging forward not quite to meet that need, but pretty fast by bureaucratic standards. Since 2009 the U.S. federal and many state governments are collectively allocating an unprecedented amount of funding to rural broadband initiatives.    The dramatic transformation underway and to be seen in the near future is a delightfully fertile area of study and inquiry for researchers across many disciplines. Geospatial data relating to broadband initiatives is both plentiful and absent depending on what you need.   The state of Iowa, however, has a lovely array of datasets freely available for downl...

By Jay Bowen This interview is part of our Data Provider Series, which highlights local governments and institutions that offer open GIS data. In each interview, providers tell us about their missions and data resources. We hope this will be a great way for readers to learn more about local GIS developments and new initiatives. Name : Casey James Kohrt Title: Geospatial Administrator Division/Department: Iowa Department of Natural Resources, GIS Department Website: https://geodata.iowa.gov How long has the Iowa DNR created or maintained geospatial data? The Iowa DNR has been creating geospatial data dating to the late 1980s. It was created out of the Groundwater Protection Act, where they were to develop a map of groundwater vulnerabilities. Many datasets came out of that project, including PLSS, soils, and geology, mostly from digitizing paper maps on a digitizing table. Many projects continued, and we had a nice ‘library’ of data. We called it the NRGIS Library. In the Flood of 19...

 By Jay Bowen Featured Item: National Flood Hazard Layer: Iowa With flooding a perennial problem in the low-lying riverine areas of Iowa, the National Flood Hazard Layer: Iowa is a particularly useful resource for Iowans. This dataset is managed by the Iowa Department of Natural Resources on the Iowa Geodata website. From this dataset, you can download the National Flood Hazard Layer, which includes the Iowa portion of the regulatory dataset produced by FEMA for their Flood Insurance Rate Map (FIRM). It is particularly useful to community officials and members of the public who wish to know which parts of their communities are within areas FEMA defines as having a 1-percent-annual-chance for a flood event, a 0.2-percent-annual-chance flood event, or minimal flood risk. In this post, I will take a look at one presentation of the data in an interactive online map. I live in Iowa City, in Johnson County. By downloading the data as a geodatabase, I can open it in QGIS, extract the fea...