The USGS GNIS is a gazetteer database of close to two million geographic landmarks in the United States (and, oddly enough, Antarctica as well). Types of landmarks include manmade (airports, hospitals, populated places, etc.) as well as natural (summits, arches, cliffs, etc.). There’s a direct interface to the GNIS at the USGS’s Board Of Geographic Names website that lets you search by feature name and get:
- Federally recognized feature name,
- Feature type,
- Elevation (where available),
- Estimated 1994 population of incorporated cities and towns,
- State(s) and county(s) in which the feature is located,
- Latitude and longitude of the feature location,
- List of USGS 7.5-minute x 7.5-minute topographic maps on which the feature is shown, and
- Names other than the federally recognized name by which the feature may be or have been known.
- Links to sites offering map viewers for graphical display of the feature
- Link to site offering information about the watershed area in which the feature is located
You can also download tab-delimited text files for individual states, or all states in one large file.
There’s another site with GNIS data, plus some extras. Wayhoo.com lets you search a copy of the GNIS database for US features, but has some additional options as well:
- Browse for features by county, filtering by feature type
- Add features to a waypoint list, then export the list directly from the browser to any GPS waypoint format supported by GPSBabel (GPX, EasyGPS, Garmin MapSource, Fugawi, OziExplorer, etc.)
- Plot the feature’s location in Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, Virtual Earth, Terraserver, and a bunch more
- Find the National Weather Service 7-day forecast for that location
- Find the nearest recorded Degree Confluence point
- Find the nearest geocaches
- And a bunch more …
And Wayhoo requires no registration; you just need to have cookies enabled on your browser if you want to create a waypoint list.
DigiPoint is a great site for selecting points in Google Maps, and then exporting them as a CSV file for import into a GPS as waypoints using GPSBabel. Once loaded into the GPS, you can create a route using those waypoints, but it would be easier and more convenient if you could create both the points and the route in Google Maps, and then create a GPX route file automatically. And there’s a website that lets you do that.
Continue reading ‘Creating GPS Routes In Google Maps’
3DEM ostensibly comes with a number of GPS interface capabilities, including the ability to download waypoints, routes, and tracks, and upload waypoints created in the program. I say ostensibly because I could only get one of the features to work with my Garmin 60Cx, downloading tracks; maybe you might be able to get more to work with your GPS model. But even that one feature allows you to do something more than just display the track on top of a terrain image: it lets you see the elevation profile for the entire track.
Continue reading ‘GPS Track Elevation Profiles With 3DEM’
Note 1: See this series of posts for info on converting shapefiles to KML format.
Note 2: The current version of the program has a bug that doesn’t let you select a file. The author has indicated on the website that a new version should be out soon, but until then, you may have to use the approach described in either this post or another post. Also available now is an online KML to shapefile converter.
In two previous posts, I covered several multi-step hacks for converting Google Earth KML files to shapefile format, since there wasn’t a single-step free approach to my knowledge. Well, there is now, and it makes the process a lot easier.
Continue reading ‘The Last Word (For Now) On Converting Google Earth KML Files To Shapefiles’
From the “I’ve been missing the obvious” file: If you have the MapSource program that comes with many Garmin GPS units or Garmin MapSource data disks, you can export waypoints, tracks or routes in the display directly to Google Earth with the View => View In Google Earth command. The data can be imported from a GPS unit, imported from a file (*.gdb, *.gpx, *.mps or *.loc formats supported), or entered manually into the program using its editing tools. Once displayed in Google Earth, you can make a permanent KML file of the data by right-clicking on any the appropriate data entries in the Places Pane, and choosing Save As.
Note: See this series of posts for info on converting shapefiles to KML format.
I haven’t really found a good way to transform KML files to shapefile format, and certainly not one that preserves most of the attribute information or data associated with the shapes in the KML file. But I’ve come up with a mildly painful, multi-step hack that will allow you to convert the point, path and polygon shapes to shapefile format, and which allows you to keep at least the object name associated with points and paths.
Continue reading ‘Converting Google Earth KML Files To Shapefile Format’
Hand-held GPS units typically have a limited amount of memory to store track points. My old Garmin eMap could hold only about 2000 trackpoints, while my newer 60Cx unit can hold up to 10000 trackpoints. There are also sometimes limits on the maximum number of trackpoints in a saved track; for example, the eMap limits the maximum number of trackpoints in a saved track to 250, while the Garmin limits you to 500. But suppose you have a long active track with greater than 500 points, and you’d like to save that track for future use in your GPS? Or you need to get the total number of trackpoints down to fit into your unit’s memory? There’s an easy way to “simplify” the track, reducing the total number of trackpoints without significantly affecting the track shape.
Continue reading ‘Simplifying GPS Tracks’
Dirk from Mountain Bike Guru wrote to say that his website (free registration required) also features a free GPX to KML converter. Right now, it only works with tracks, not waypoints, but the uploaded GPX file is saved in its original format; once they get waypoint conversion working, you’ll be able to pull up old files and convert them completely to KML. His blog also has some good GPS-related tips as well.
