T.Dubya.

It was time once again tonight to preach the open source GIS gospel to the masses.

I felt much better prepared this time with a variety of new demos using QGIS, PostGIS, and Grass. The students really seemed to respond to the extra dose of demos, much needed I think around 8-9pm at night… Also just three months ago I really had no polished applications from work to show off, tonight I had at least three including the Watershed Locator, ODFW demo and Aaron Racicot’s Open Ocean Map. They really show the progress Aaron and I have made in the last few months.

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Download Base Data

Students, your comments on my presentation are more than welcome, you can leave them right on this site. Especially the stuff I can do better. I really enjoyed your questions, it was clear some of you were actually paying attention. I hope I inspired at least a single person to try some of the tools out.

We’ve been working hard at Ecotrust on a revamped version of Inforain.

There’s a new mapbook interface providing access to high-resolution images of a number of maps Ecotrust has produced. It allows you to search by name, keyword, region and theme. A variety of presentation, reports and datasets are also available.

Finally, we’ve created a Watershed Locator tool for the site, that allows users to explore watersheds within the Coho salmon territory of North America. It allows you to search by address, watershed name or just by clicking around on the map. Watershed boundaries, major rivers and perennial streams are displayed within an OpenLayers mapping client. One of the most useful features is the watershed ‘ladder’ which allows you to move up and down between watershed ‘levels’. Searching for a particular watershed will also bring up a number of statistics. Some of the more interesting ones include miles of anadromous streams, number of minor and major dams within the watershed, the number of LEED certified buildings, sq.miles of development/farmland/forestland/native land, etc.

A number of open source tools are used in the Watershed Locator including OpenLayers, Mapserver, TileCache, PostGIS, Prototype and Sript.aculo.us. A number of free services were also used including the Google terrain layer for the map and the Yahoo! geocoder for converting addresses to latitude/longitude locations. The terrain map layer is particularly useful for overlaying watershed boundaries. It becomes very clear to the user how the terrain delineates those boundaries. Thank you Google for releasing the terrain layer just weeks before Inforain went live!

In the future we’d like to allow users to access additional watershed resources including links to watershed councils, information on restoration projects, etc. The watershed locator code is available free and open source on our development site The hope is that the concept of a watershed locator as an exploratory educational tool will be replicated in different regions and possibly for different purposes.