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Of course there’s a xkcd about it.
I do wish there was a river settings to better highlight rivers.
https://river-runner-global.samlearner.com/
Maybe that’s something for you?
this is really cool, thanks so much
If you’re taking requests, could you point me to a visualization that shows the navigable ones (including canals, BTW)?
Tbh I only had this because of two reasons:
- ages ago an account on Mastodon shared it
- I need to prove to myself that taking a day to sort all my bookmarks was a good investment of my time.
Wow this is unreal
There’s another cool site like this that wasn’t as graphically cool but popped up various rivers quickly just by mousing over. Can’t find it right now but I’ll check again to see if I can dig it up.
Good point. They’re always impossible to find unless you know exactly where to look
Download the surveyed water data, turn the layer on, profit?
openstreetmaps ftw. Get that, turn on cartographic overlays (outdated scans but still useful), aerial imagery, download and import nhd data, pull up ngs website, and enjoy. Help us map rivers! Even better if you can do an actual ground survey w/ gps.
I spent way toonlong mapping our houses in my neighborhood. It’s always funny to see my work on apps, I’m like shit that street is missing houses I need to get on it.
yeah, it’s addictive, I started with sidewalks in my neighborhood, and before I knew it, I was mapping parking zones, fire hydrants, trash cans, benches, traffic signals, speed limits, turn lanes…
What’s the best tool to map points? I walk my dog and would love to quickly drop a pin for a sewer grate or fire hydrant? Is there something I can do mobile?
I’ve only used vespucci and it gets the job done.
Okay what is nhd and ngs? When I’m horny for aerial imagery, I’m usually browsing Landsat and Sentinel archives.
National hydrography dataset and national geodetic survey (but I actually meant USGS, they provide a lot of data, their map viewer is a good introduction).
Oh thank you very much. Yes, the map viewer I often use, although I’ve only touched Landsat and Sentinel imagery.
btw NHD data tends to be too large for JOSM to handle… my one complaint about JOSM, I feel it could be more memory efficient. Qgis can be used to process and extract large datasets, just split them up into several files per state. (You also need to merge the source files.) But it’s totally worth the pain, because you get a lot of rich, high resolution data.
Depending on where you live, your state or city might also have open datasets available.
Thanks for the recommendation! Downloading osm now o7
Be sure to check out the osm wiki! For editing, you can use their web viewer, but I personally prefer JOSM for more advanced work. Vespucci is a great tool for mapping on your phone.
I heard you’re not supposed to go source-to-mouth
Sometimes, in the heart of obsession, it’s forgivable to go source to mouth.
Iz only smellz…
Precisely why many do it
I like to do this for civil constructions.
You ever took a look an desert settlements?
There are so many awesome things to see there, and thinking of all the little humans doing their shit there is mesmerizing.
Kind of Sim city/sims in real life
Agreed, I’ve learned a lot doing this. Sometimes it leads to a story, like the ruins of a federal fire watchtower that was destroyed by arson, or discovering one of the largest fisheries in the country. I’ve also noticed a lot more houses are torn down in my city than might be expected. Whole blocks are empty fields now, or maybe have one derelict house remaining.
It’s also disturbing just how much trash people collect in their yards… and the massive wounds of foresting and strip mining.
Ugh, I was in rural china once and the uncle of my ex threw all his trash in his back yard. Disgusting. Nobody really minded though. They didn’t approve, but they didn’t confront him.
I feel targeted.
Trying to find the right zoom level that shows the name of the river
Why do that when you can pull in a hydrological dataset and perform stream network analysis to find the flow path between your points of interest?
smh at folks using googlemaps instead of qgis
I feel seen :D
It’s a fun way to do some free virtual tourism. Especially if it’s well travelled places with plenty of user content. Plus, you get to be as nosy as you want, without making people uncomfortable.
I love looking at odd architecture for example, but not everyone would appreciate me walking around their building and peering intently through the windows.
I used to process aerial imagery and it was so good for this reason. It was like playing Geoguesser as a job.
That sounds like an awesome job. As someone who loves aviation, photography and maps, I’d probably really enjoy that. How’d you get into that field if you don’t mind me asking?
I minored in GIS and needed to feed myself before going to grad school haha. Saw the advert while on Indeed. It was an underpaid production job with in house tools so they took anyone that could use a pc. Very chill though, so I didn’t mind the lower wages. A lot of that sort of thing is outsourced now.
My wife and I used to take care of her grandmother. I had a simple VR headset and I would show her parts of cities she hadn’t been to in street view.
Nostalgia is an incredibly powerful thing. Especially when it comes to elderly and/or people with dementia.
I’ve done a fair few VR demonstrations with my Quest headsets. Google Streetview-like apps are always a big hit with everyone. It’s a great way to revisit places from the past with a good sense of presence. And of course to see a place you’ve always wanted to go.
Why follow a line when I could make a DEM from some LIDAR data, then run Aspect and Accumulation functions and dileneate watersheds?
You’re now playing GIS DnD:
The LiDAR dataset you’re using was scanned in a forested area and doesn’t include any secondary return data. As a result, your watersheds are occluded and the data doesn’t provide the greatest cartography.
What do you do?
I attempt to create a TIN from survey data collected with the tree survey.
Rolls RPLS…
Success! You manage to build a somewhat useful TIN from the data. Upon further inspection, the contours of the watersheds you were looking for are vaguely visible. Occlusion from the surrounding trees has had an impact on the dataset though, and it seems the noise wasn’t filtered out of the dataset properly, leaving you with the occasional ridiculously stretched triangle to work with. Generating nice vector data from this will prove challenging.
How do you proceed?
Knowing this isn’t old growth and that the trees have been harvested for lumber multiple times, I summon my unpaid intern and have her search for maps containing contours in a year closely following a tree harvest.
I cast Quadrangle with a conformity bonus from my UTM state plane.
[consults with other DMs]: “Wait…they can’t do that, can they?”… “Really? Well, damn”.
Your intern somehow manages to convince the local forestry corporation to share an old field map of the region. Problem is, the file is not georeferenced and she is having trouble doing so. Not being familiar with affine transformations, she picks some horrible references and her attempt has an error of a couple meters.
This is your chance to teach your intern a valuable skill and you’re very close to finalizing the map of the region. What is your next move?
This guy maps
Lol, relatable.
Me exploring railroads on GSV…
Bro wtf where does the river come from? I tried following it upstream on gmaps but it just stops in the middle of some field. Not even a mountain or something
It goes… underground!
Modern technology has really spoilt us
