Click
on one of the MAP IT categories to start mapping. |
The Texas Land Trends website has chosen an Internet version of GIS to add additional context and information to the relevance of the data for this project. In this project, GIS web-mapping allows a user to study non-spatially explicit data (land value, land use, and ownership characteristics) as a map. Additionally, this data can be overlayed with other important data sets (political boundaries, soils, river and water systems) to be able to seek associations between political and biological boundaries, and land trends based on economics and land use. The results you will discover depend on the map you choose to create! |
Mapping in a traditional sense (paper maps) is the basis for understanding what a landscape means ecologically, in relationships to other landscapes, and where the area of interest is spatially (it's location on the ground). The difficulty with paper maps is that they are difficult to use with other maps. When you try to overlay them together, they often times do not match. |
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 Geographic
Information Systems (GIS) use digital representation of paper maps. GIS
systems work on a coordinate based digital system. Through a GIS, maps
of different scales and representations can be overlayed on each other
so that their characteristics and spatial place matches between maps.
A kind of "map sandwich". Once maps can be overlayed on top
of each other spatially, then a person can begin to seek relationships
between maps. For instance, a person could compare certain soils and their
occurance to vegetation distribution. Additionally, a GIS system allows
data that is usually represented by numbers (e.g. census data - income
by census block) to be visually represented as a map. |
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