Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2002 14:10:37 -0400 Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: "J.B. Churchill" Subject: Atlas Maps for Garrett & Allegany online Comments: To: Fran Pope , The Gaffney's , "Twigg, Bob and Mary" , "Stepp, Ed and Nancy" , Boone Jon , "Braitman, Kenny and Ann" , Brewer Gwen , "Dennis, Nancy and James" , "Devlin, Bill" , "Dodge, Kevin" , "Durham, Billie" , "Englar, Courtney" , Faherty Gladys , "Friedland, Bernice and Arthur" , "Gates, Dr. Ed" , Hager Chuck , "Harrison,Betsy" , "Huebner, Mary and John" , Johnson Barbara , "Kellermeyer, Bill and Ann" , Kiddy Ray , "Knobel-Besa, Penny" , Pope Fran , "Reynolds, Virginia" , Simons Teresa , Skipper Connie , Jessica Kerns-McClelland Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed To MD birders (Western MD in particular): I just finished putting all the atlas blocks in Garrett and Allegany Counties on a website. The url is: http://www.nrac.wvu.edu/acbc/atlas/wmd.html I was motivated to do this because I recently travelled down-state and went birding in PG county and realized that every place I went I ran the risk of being dangerously close to block boundaries. Without a map of the atlas block that I was surveying, I had no real idea where the boundaries were. Fred Fallon (County Coordinator for PG County) was able to provide some assistance through a similar resource that allowed me to figure out where I was and even track down the atlas workers whose territory I was poaching in). http://home.earthlink.net/~fwfallon I recently wrote a letter to the Atlas Committee Board of Directors proposing that the center that I work for at WVU, could do something like this for the whole state but it would probably take a fair amount of work to do it (although it took me only ~ 15 hours just to do these 2 counties by myself). Also the USGS topographic DRG's that I used to create this are no longer available as a free download (they were back when I downloaded them all). If the county coordinators want to give me a list of all the blocks that are currently assigned, I could fix the image map to indicate block availability by color coding or some other means. I could have made the maps into adobe's pdf format for ease of printing (as was done on the New York Atlas website; you may find that my jpegs don't print at 8.5 X 11 without some formatting first). I could have added some more background data (roads, lakes, streams etc) but I wanted to get this on the internet before too many more safe dates end this season. The maps I have provided on this webpage will allow travelling birders to examine and / or print out a map of an area that they plan to visit in Western, MD before they come out here. This isn't as elaborate as the site that Tyler Bell recently posted about in MDOSPREY (or the New York site) but I am hoping that visiting birders can make use of it. Sorry for any cross-posting. J.B. the New York Atlas page ... http://birds.cornell.edu/fnysbc/ProjAtlas.htm ====================================================== John B. Churchill, M.S. Home (304) 292-5072 GIS Analyst Work (304) 293-4832 West Virginia University ext. 4458 Natural Resource Analysis Center Fax (304) 293-3752 P.O. Box 6108 Morgantown, WV 26506-6108 webpage: http://www.nrac.wvu.edu/users/jbc ======================================================================= To leave the MDOsprey list, send e-mail to listserv@home.ease.lsoft.com with the following message in line 1: signoff mdosprey ======================================================================= I'd rather be birding =========================================================================