Map design and production topics.
The King County GIS Center was recently asked by the Office of Emergency Management to assist with updates to the Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment. This report “…identifies hazards most common to King County with assessment of vulnerability in terms of exposure to impacts, risk in terms of probability of impacts, and consequences in terms…
King County has acquired and maintained elevation data derived from lidar since 2002 in cooperation with the Puget Sound Lidar Consortium. Elevation products such as contours, watershed boundaries, and steep slope areas have been greatly improved in accuracy.
In March of 2019, King County Emergency Management submitted a request to KCGIS Center Spatial Services for a tabletop 3D model of the county to be used for community outreach and education on the variety of physical topography throughout King County and its challenges for emergency management.
As the most-used GIS packages, ArcGIS and QGIS are amazing and powerful for analytical applications. Despite their analytical strengths, they sometimes don’t quite achieve the quality needed for high-level graphics. It’s common for cartographers to prepare maps or layers of maps in ArcGIS, then export them for use in Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator where more sophisticated graphic techniques can be applied to create finished map products. The King County GIS Center recently came across another need to go beyond the graphic capabilities of ArcGIS.
The King County Department of Natural Resources & Parks oversees several ecological restoration sites along the Duwamish River. Because the river is estuarine and will be impacted by the rising ocean levels associated with climate change, there was understandably some concern that these sites would also be affected. They needed to visualize what their projects…
GIS & You readers know that I have written several articles in the past about using GIS for issues related to Equity and Social Justice (ESJ). A new article in Directions Magazine Insights on Location by Chris Wayne provides an excellent overview of Communities Using Maps to Enact Environmental Justice. Chris Wayne’s article touches many…
Whether familiar with the history and personalities of mountaineering or not, cartography students of a certain age who studied mapmaking at the University of Washington would frequently hear the name of an earlier UW grad, Dee Molenaar. Any who aspired to turn their hand to depicting terrain on maps would learn from their professor of the exemplary landform maps created by Molenaar.
A year or two back, the Washington Department of Natural Resources made some fascinating maps of braided river channels. These maps used lidar-derived imagery to show the twisting patterns of the riverbeds in a novel way — as bright, colorful images on a black background. They looked similar to x-rays, revealing the bones of the…
A King County policy priority is building equity and opportunity for all. King County’s pro-equity policy agenda has eight focus areas, one of which is environment and climate. Recently I worked with the King County Solid Waste Division to help develop an ArcGIS Online web application for the equity and social justice (ESJ) assessments of…
Many of us have become numb to the latest news of firearm deaths across America. At least once almost every week there is news of a shooting in a school, workplace, church, home, or other public place. National news during the past 10 days included a school shooting in Colorado and reports of a spike…
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