A new web map allows us to explore and acknowledge the memory of the land of indigenous peoples around the world. Property ownership data management is one of the primary applications for a geographic information system (GIS). My first GIS job with the East Bay Municipal Utility District in Oakland was to manage digitizing 350,000…
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.
As King County was taking delivery of the 2019 digital imagery data from its vendor, EagleView Technologies, GIS analysts, cartographers, and software engineers across King County government, plus users of our GIS products throughout the area, anxiously awaited the creation, from the delivered data, of a variety of secondary imagery products for use in their analyses, maps, and applications.
Geospatial data and tools, including personal location tracking, are extremely valuable for policy planning, public information, and public health response, and may play a valuable role in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, many privacy experts are concerned that a renewed impetus to collect the location of all global citizens leads to massive infringements on…
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…
King County has added to its collection of high-resolution aerial imagery. Local jurisdictions can share in the bounty. Collecting high resolution aerial imagery is habit forming, at least it is for King County. We have been doing it on a regular basis since 2007, and we continued in 2019. The 2019 acquisition captured three-inch-resolution orthogonal…
When I used to work as GIS Mapping Supervisor for the East Bay Municipal Utility District in California, I would be surprised when a homeowner would pay thousands of dollars to have a fire hydrant installed close to their property. What they were doing was to ensure that their home could be better protected against…
Those in the GIS community know the power of spatial data and geospatial technology to respond to public health emergencies. The story of Dr. John Snow and his use of simple mapping of data to respond to the London Broad Street cholera epidemic of 1854 is famous. Snow is considered to be one of the…
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…
The responsibilities of county government are many, including elections, criminal justice, property value assessment and taxation, and dozens of others. One obscure but economically important responsibility of King County is to reduce and, if possible, prevent the negative impacts of noxious weeds.
GIS & You 