I am trying to make a map that is all the block management areas in Montana. I have never made anything like this before and am just wondering where to start with this?
If by block management you mean Surface Management by various Federal and Montana agencies, see yogozoo's/yogomaps MT topo+Public Land and MT Landowner Parcel maps.
He works in MT and searches out the latest changes and corrections.
See the gpsfiledepot tutoriasl on how to make maps. Part 6 is on Federal Lands (etc.)
You can download Surface Management Agency data from the MT BLM website.
Well thank you but the map you suggest has State and BLM but not block management. Block management is private land that you acquire permission for and then you can hunt.
I had never heard the term block management before. Perhaps contacting the MT State Fish & Wildlife Agency (or appropriate named agency) would be a good place to ask your question.
Are these what MTcart has as Game Management Units? If so, he might provide more info on where he got the data.
Have you looked at "huntinggpsmaps.com"? Not free, but sounds like they have what you are wanting, unless you just want to do it yourself, which is perfectly fine.
Thank you but I have looked at that. I guess the only way to show people what I mean is to give you this website and you can look at it. http://fwp.mt.gov/hunting/hunterAccess/privateLand/blockman/
It will give you a definition and hopefully show you what I am trying to do.
From looking at one of the maps it seems that you need to make georeferenced polygons corresponding to the block management areas. This would be simple if you had mapping software like Global Mapper, but that's expensive. You could also try creating a "Garmin Custom Map" raster image. Probably the easiest thing for you to do would be to contact the agency that made the PDF maps and ask them if you could get the maps in shapefile format. You could then import that data into GPSmapedit, save it as MP, and compile it into a vector IMG.
I am just curious if anyone found any additional info. It seems Montana FWP could make the GIS files available. They seem to be resistant to that for some reason but imagine it will only be a matter of time before the BMA maps are available with GPS units becoming so popular and more and more folks asking about BMA details.
As a "wanna be" I have been looking at how hard it would be to try and create the BMA maps for my ETREX vista but know what will take me months to try and figure out someone else probaby could do in hours.
At http://www.huntingGPSmaps.com we had the Montana Block Management Areas on our MT map, but the MT fish, wildlife, and parks requested we remove it, so we obliged.
They are very resistant to giving out there data, we just developed the layer ourselves by looking at their paper maps.
It wouldn't be too bad to make the boundaries of 1 Block that you are interested in. Just georeference the FWP's pdf map in google earth and draw a track around the boundary to send to your GPS.
Good Luck
Thank you very much for the info. I may just forget the whole thing and do what you say by drawing a track around the ones that I want to look at.