New Land Information Website

[Featherdfishead]

Way to go Barry - i've been using Landmatters for the last few months and hadn't realized you were involved. Great resource - Thank You!

AjR

[beatup]

Barry thanks for all your hard work on creating a great site

[snakejim]

Great site! I've been using it regularly.

Thanks a heap!

[tvanwho]

Is my Win XP too old to use this,loads kinda slow , closeup Arizona aerials aren't as good as Google Earth,no detailed images, icons look identical to my new Footprints of Quartzite,Az dvd so easy to use. At least I can see land status and claims now in Tonto NF,Az,but hard to navigate to a particular map destination? Maybe am doing it wrong? Can I put in GPS coordinates?

Thanks for all the hard work.

[Clay Diggins]

Thanks for the encouragement everybody! There's lots more to  come. I just put up several more State Geology Maps and we are working on displaying Motor Vehicle Use Maps for the Forests soon.

Win XP can handle the site tvanwho. Some of the very early versions of Internet Explorer fail when using the Library Search but the maps should be fine. Land Matters is entirely internet based so it will always be slower than FootPrint maps which are running locally on your computer.  If you have a slow internet connection the difference can be um... frustrating.

The Aerial Photos, on Land Matters, are the highest resolution available to the public. About 40% of the U.S. is 1 foot resolution or better, the rest is three foot. Google uses a gaussian blur overlay to smooth their Aerials, it makes them appear to be smoother and higher resolution but the actual resolution is the same in the U.S.

Google does not allow other applications to use their Aerials so if you like theirs better you will have to use their platform.

If you are having jumpy navigation it's probably because you aren't waiting for the map to load before making a new request. The map remembers all your requests and loads them in the order you made them.

If you get too eager and click twice for the same action the map will see that as a different request and  start loading again without waiting for you to see the first request. Also If you have a laptop the trackpad will probably try to zoom in and out if you use two fingers so be sure to avoid touching the trackpad between map requests.

Land Matters maps don't have all the tools that FootPrints maps have. They do show your cursor position in decimal degrees at the bottom left of the mapping window and if you need degrees, minutes, seconds you can use the X/Y tool button to see the clicked coordinate position in decimal degrees and degrees, minutes, seconds.

Barry

[Bob(AK)]

I like it , thanks

[NuggetBob]

Weedoggie! That's some fancy fingerwork on the ol' keybored. 

[tvanwho]

Thanks Barry. I don't spose you could tell us why GPS numbers on Google based maps are now shown as xx.yyyyy, ex 32.11154,  instead of the old way of degrees ,minutes, and seconds? My handheld GPS does degrees/minutes/seconds also. How do I convert deg/min/sec to the decimal equivalent and vice versa?

Thanks. FYI,I normally use AcmeMapper 2.0 which shows GPS  with 5 decimals. Then, I use Google Earth to zoom in and get a view of the spot from different angles, perspectives, and elevations.

Determining land ownership is the next challenge. I sometimes can find this out by checking to see if a county has a free Online GIS Mapping system which will show property owners, boundaries, even property taxes paid. Sometimes they charge a fee for this service. Beats having to go to county courthouses or buying lots of Plat books especially if out of state...

-Tom

[Clay Diggins]

On 3/24/2015 at 9:04 PM, tvanwho said:

Thanks Barry. I don't spose you could tell us why GPS numbers on Google based maps are now shown as xx.yyyyy, ex 32.11154,  instead of the old way of degrees ,minutes, and seconds? My handheld GPS does degrees/minutes/seconds also. How do I convert deg/min/sec to the decimal equivalent and vice versa?

All modern digital maps are going to decimal degrees. Base 10 math is much easier than an arbitrary base 360/ base 60/ base 60 system. Even so with modern computers it's trivial to change the display to the system you are most comfortable with.

If you are using Google Earth you can change the location display to decimal degrees, degrees minutes seconds, or UTM meters in the preferences.

I think you will find deep in your GPS unit settings that you have similar choices there. Usually those are named something like ddmmss or dddddd.

Between the two of them you should be able to come up with a way to match their displays. If you are using a Google map product you can put in the Latitude & Longitude coordinates in either form and the software will understand no matter how the coordinates are displayed.

On 3/24/2015 at 9:04 PM, tvanwho said:

Thanks. FYI,I normally use AcmeMapper 2.0 which shows GPS  with 5 decimals. Then, I use Google Earth to zoom in and get a view of the spot from different angles, perspectives, and elevations.

5 decimals in Lat/Lon is going to be about three foot precision. Your maps and your GPS unit just don't have that sort of accuracy. GPS accuracy is reliable to about 30 foot which is the same as 4 decimals.

We could easily show 20 decimals on the Land Matters maps but that would be greater than millionths of an inch precision. No mapping or GPS system can come close to that. Displaying the coordinates with greater precision does nothing to increase the accuracy of a map.

Even though modern handheld commercial grade GPS can often, under the right conditions, give accurate readings within 3 foot that is not an accuracy you can rely on. Add in the errors for orthographic projection, 40 foot accuracy on the best Topos, 3 meter accuracy on aerial photos and the reality is that mapping rarely exceeds 30 foot accuracy no matter what the display precision is.

Google Earth is an interesting, and often informative, way to view a location before putting boots on the ground but the accuracy, particularly with the "terrain" feature enabled, is not within any modern mapping standards. Expecting 5 decimal places of locational precision is wildly optimistic.

On 3/24/2015 at 9:04 PM, tvanwho said:

Determining land ownership is the next challenge. I sometimes can find this out by checking to see if a county has a free Online GIS Mapping system which will show property owners, boundaries, even property taxes paid. Sometimes they charge a fee for this service. Beats having to go to county courthouses or buying lots of Plat books especially if out of state...

 

-Tom

Counties sometimes are very reluctant to give current plat information. The tax assessor often makes good money selling that information to real estate organizations. The platting systems in use by many counties today are some of the most advanced mapping done by government. Many of them see that as a cash cow.

On our MinerDiggins FootPrints North and Middle Fork maps we were able to convince those counties to part with that information so we do have that included on those maps. In some areas of California the costs for access can run many thousands of dollars so that expense and the cost of some County Recorder's record copies can lock us out of mapping those areas ownership.

This is a rapidly evolving field and many county assessors are beginning to loosen access to those maps. If they aren't freely available online sometimes a friendly call can get you access.

Land Matters, as a non profit organization, can do a little arm twisting (they call this partnering in government speak) and get information for free or little cost. It is part of the long term land status program at Land Matters to provide local ownership information but that is a massive project that will require a major grant. Anybody with a few hundred thousand dollars to spare could get us started on that project. 

Barry

[jasong]

That's a great site Barry. I was doing a similar thing a few years back but stopped since I didn't have time or resources to maintain it with full time prospecting.

If you don't mind me asking, how do you update your claims layer? I was getting that bi-weekly LR2000 database dump from the BLM but you mentioned you could potentially update more often?

Also a request or suggestion, if you already have the database in place could you make a simple front end where we could quickly query all the fields and do complex custom searches? Similar to Lr2000 but it takes forever to navigate through their clunky interface.

Also, any chance you could create an MTP layer since they are all available at the GLO? I couldn't figure out a good way to automate it all so never managed to do it, was wondering if you have given it a shot or thought about it.