Sheltowee Trace trail with mile markers and landuse background image. First draft.

As we update the Sheltowee Trace maps, I took a diversion and looked at Tilemill from the folks at MapBox to create an interactive online map of the new alignment. Tilemill is pretty awesome app and allows you create a projects using a variety of spatial data, including Shapefiles, GeoTIFFs and GeoJSON (a new format to me, but shows some interesting possibilities).

The strength of Tilemill centers on few features; you can style layers in markup very similar to CSS, attribute data can be used for styling and interactively shown on the published map, attributes and features can be displayed differently at different zoom levels, and you publish to an MBtile file, a SQlite database. This format contains many thousands, no millions, of raster tiles that are served quite fast in your browser. In my opinion, a ton of creativity can be found in this free app.

For the Sheltowee Trace map, I pulled in a GeoTIFF of landuse with elevation hillshading, the ST trail with mile markers, and polygons of county and larger towns. After tinkering with the style sheets, I made a fairly simple map. I wanted to add so many more layers, but I had to see how it looked online. The simplest way to publish it to use MapBox’s service, but the .mbtiles file was 300 MB and I wanted to host on SheltoweeTrace.com. I needed to to use a few javascript libraries to serve this map on our server. I chose Leaflet through MapBox’s Wax library (inspired by this post) and it was fairly easy to setup. One thing I learned after a little frustration, the newest version of Leaflet.js will not work with the .js files in Wax. Use only the files included in Wax and it will work perfectly. The only other bit of code needed is something to read the data in the mbtiles file and format it properly for Wax. I used tileserver.php and it is important link if you want to display attribute data interactively.

While the map is very simple, it has some potential I think. Obviously the base map needs finishing with a good legend, but some exciting options include adding popup photos of significant trail features (with the future hope make this an interactive submission for users) and using Leaflet’s geolocation feature for mobile devices (pretty buggy now and there’s issue of offlining the data for use in the field).

Please provide contact information for your designer, if needed. We can build your ad from content you provide. We can also directly place your designed ad, if it does not exceed the ad’s dimension.

If you attach any artwork or document, please make sure it is no larger than 8mb and it is in the following format: .jpeg (JPEG photographic image), .png (graphics format), .ai (Adobe Illustrator), .pdf (Acrobat PDF), .doc (Microsoft Word) or .zip (a compressed file that could contain many files).

After you submit your artwork, we will give you a draft to edit or accept for publishing. You will also see and confirm the ad before the ad is printed.

outrageGIS mapping Ad artwork submission. Please provide contact information, in case we have a problem with your artwork.

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The University of Kentucky Native Tree Trail

The great document was made by Forestry students in UK’s College of Agriculture in 2007 and we just found it! This 2.2-mile tour locates 45 native tree species on UK’s campus and includes pictures. From the description, the document appears to be a class project for FOR 599: Geographic Information Systems in Natural Resources. Now this is a great example of using classwork & technology to keep us green and appreciate our diverse flora.

By: Lee Moser and Matt Strong
Course Instructor: Dr. Songlin Fei

This project is supported by the UK Service-Learning Grant Program, Department of Forestry, and College of Agriculture.

Download and for other local tours, visit the Department of Forestry website and click on the left-hand link, “Links and Opportunities.”

As we update the site for our 2013 hiking season, please don’t mind our fuss, too much. We’re trying organize our site better and offer more maps for spring.

We submitted the Bike Lex Map for the Kentucky Association of Mapping Professionals 2012 Kentucky GIS Conference map competition. We competed and won 2nd place! It was a great conference in Louisville and I must say that I probably gained a few pounds from all of the great food.

We invite you to visit our booth during the Woodland Art Fair this weekend, August 18-19. We are located in the back section of the Woodland Christian Church portion of the fair.

Click on map to expand

This year we have friends for neighbors, Cricket Press. They were near High Street for many years, but decided to join us in the tree covered corner of the fair. They design and handprint all kinds of awesomeness.

This map shows our locations with bike lanes (blue lines) and preferred bike routes (orange lines) to help cyclists navigate this car crazy event. Bluegrass Community & Technical College is offering bike valet parking this year.

We visited Colorado this June & July and had a remarkable journey through the Rocky Mountain National Park and Arapaho National Forest. The Never Summer Wilderness area borders the western side of Rocky Mountain NP and straddles the Continental Divide. 13,000-foot peaks with 11,000-foot alpine lakes on their flanks were this trip’s scenic destinations. Parika Lake provided one nice, large trout, but photography was our challenge. Look at some photos or [Read more…]

This past Thursday evening Boyd ‘mapped-out!’ Lexington’s Living Arts and Science Center’s January Discovery Night. This two-hour monthly event brings in families to learn about topics in science and art and often has a collaborative element.

Boyd focused on making maps of course, but he also discussed some basic ideas of what maps do (e.g., they show where stuff is) and possibilities they give us (e.g., understanding why stuff is where it is). The kids enjoyed seeing early Kentucky maps from 1733 & 1811 and a map of the modern world illuminated at night. They were a wonderful bunch and had bright responses to geography questions. As a bonus, he gave them a bird’s eye view of the Red River Gorge with two great destinations there to visit.

We would like to thank the Center for this opportunity to see the wonder and happiness in children’s eyes as they explored maps! Visit the Center’s site to see more Discovery Night events.