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.
Access to fresh, locally-produced food is a priority for many in King County, just as raising consumer awareness of these products is essential to the success and viability of farms and other agricultural businesses. On July 13, King County launched its new Local Food Finder, a convenient, mobile-friendly, GIS-enabled, interactive map which identifies where and…
The King County Information Technology GIS For Equity & Social Justice Team received Esri’s Special Achievement in GIS (SAG) Award on July 13, 2020, at the annual Esri User Conference. Selected from over 300,000 eligible candidates, King County Information Technology received the award for its innovative application of mapping and analytics technology, as well as…
Who is a geographer? What are the competencies necessary to practice geography? The impact of geography on our lives is so powerful and pervasive, that often we do not think about the geographic decisions that we make every day in our personal lives. I think that we under-estimate a class of people most profoundly impacted…
COVID-19 and social distancing have made connecting for Equity and Social Justice (ESJ) chats challenging. This interview is one over ‘virtual coffee’ with three King County GIS professionals. Hear them share their technologist’s excitement that GIS for ESJ is feasible and impactful! Meet them below. Greg: “Mary, Dennis and Fred, as King County IT (KCIT)…
I started this GIS & You article in May 2019. What took me so long to complete it? Here is what I started to write, beginning more than 13 months ago. Back then I wrote…. “We know for a fact that hate crimes occur. Wikipedia describes hate crime as… …a prejudice-motivated crime which occurs when a…
King County GIS is presenting URISA’s one-day GIS Program Management workshop, live and online on Thursday, July 23. Registration is now open. Today most government organizations have some type of GIS program in place. They vary from being in their early stages, to the rebuilding or tuning-up phase, to being completely transformed as new technologies…
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.
While Washington State and King County Covid-19 stay-at-home restrictions remain in place, the King County GIS Training program is still in operation with all classes offered live online. Our next offering is Introduction to ArcGIS Pro, to be offered on June 9-10. This is the same class that we offer in our King Street Center…
GIS & You 