I'd like to show land use status (BLM, National Park, National Forest, State Park) as well as land cover and hydrography on the same map. Ideally this would be by use of semi-transparent polygons with trees and water overlaid. Has anybody tried this, or am I on my own here?
I tried this in my earlier maps, such as this: http://www.gpsfiledepot.com/maps/view/439/ but was never happy with it. It works up to a point if you make the public lands a darker shade of green, but it becomes hard to distinguish an open field inside of a park, or the difference between a forested wetland and open wetland inside a park for example.
(http://stephencreek.com/njpb/BoydMap/205-02.jpg)
Give it a try and see what you think. On my newer maps, I converted the polygons to lines and only showed the boundaries. This can get lost in the clutter of elevation contours, steams and roads however.
Thanks,
I'm thinking maybe it would be better to just make a second (transparent?) map that I can turn on and off when I think I might be getting close to private land.
seldom_sn, It has probably been close to 2 years ago but RWS was doing some rather involved shaded land areas as your talking about, about a year ago GeoBobC was also. If I remember correctly the final outcome that looked and seemed to work the best was not a shaded polygon but a cross hatched area of different line types within the polygon (widths, colors, dashed, etc.) the trick to having it look its best was figuring out the pixel spacing between lines. Both had posted some info. on Groundspeak. RWS does have a site of his own. Sorry I can't be of more help.
Eastern Landownership and Western Land Ownership are transparent overlays and they work fine with hydrology. But I suspect there would be problems with tree cover. My typ file for Western Land Ownership matchs the BLM's color code fairly close. You are welecome to use it. Or you can tell me where the BLM shapefiles are for the state and I can add the state to Western land Ownership. Its real simple to add a state and I can do it in about 1/2 hour.
Thanks, Jim Bensman. You've already got Utah covered.
Thanks, eaparks. I remember the Groundspeak discussion, but I didn't have any use for it at the time. I'll have to check out RWS's website. His tutorial was the one that got me started mapmaking.
I used diagonal colored lines to show surface ownership in my 'Surface Management Agency overlay' mapset built from BLM files last summer.