Public Health and the GIS Center launched a new map-based application in August 2023, consolidating septic and Group B water system records. The app simplifies access to records and provides valuable information for homeowners, potential buyers, companies, and real estate professionals. The application’s successful implementation has been well-received and praised for its ease of use and efficiency.
I recently attended the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association (URISA) annual GIS-Pro Conference in Columbus, Ohio. The 2023 URISA ESIG Awards One of the highlights of the Conference is the annual awards breakfast, where inductees into the GIS Hall of Fame are announced, as well as various service awards to URISA members, committees, and…
We at both King County GIS (KCGIS) and Urban Indian Health Institute (UIHI) acknowledge that we are on the traditional land of the first people of Seattle, the Duwamish People past and present, and honor, with gratitude, the land itself and the Duwamish Tribe. By Thomas Lawrence, Daysha Gunther, and Martell Hesketh (UIHI) Urban Indian…
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…
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…
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.
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.
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…
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…
GIS & You 