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Does anyone use GIS?

PostPosted: May 15, 2016 8:42 pm
by rl23455
Does anyone use GIS? Just curious. Wanting to exchange ideas and methods.

I have been incorporating the Marbles in N. California into a GIS database. There are hundreds of caves there and the karst is like swiss cheese. The old surface survey they did before satellites was pretty good, but the Old Timers have forgotten cave locations. Gps is not enough to "re-find" old entrances due to karst nature.

I use QGIS. I bought a relatively in-expensive commercial grade gps to mark cave entrances and such. And then the F.S. had extra money and ran LIDAR over the area. Still actively working on the data, it's a massive project.

cheers,
Tom

Re: Does anyone use GIS?

PostPosted: May 16, 2016 8:21 am
by gindling
Check out the work done by the Bigfork High School Cave Club and Hans Bodenhamer in Montana. They deal with GIS and use it to inventory all sorts of information. They also presented during the opening ceremonies of the International GIS Conference. They have a great website that shows what types of monitoring they do and examples of their work.

This is from their website:
We are always looking for projects, partners, and opportunities to share our program with others. Please contact us for more information.


http://bigforkhighschoolcaveclub.weebly ... oring.html

Re: Does anyone use GIS?

PostPosted: May 19, 2016 2:13 am
by driggs
Hi Tom,

I'm a big QGIS fan, and have a fair bit of experience using GIS to manage large karst inventories. It's an excellent way to get a handle on "the big picture". I envision that the distinction between cave survey software and GIS will get fuzzier and fuzzier as time goes on; for now the best way to bridge the gap is to dump ESRI Shapefiles from your cave survey software (Compass, Walls, Survex, Therion all export Shapefiles, though it's not always easy to do) to represent lineplots, and manage your cave records from a geospatial database or Shapefile strictly in the GIS domain.

I also happen to have recently relocated to Northern CA and would love to visit The Marbles when it becomes accessible this summer. If you're looking for trip participants, feel free to send me a PM or dig up my contact info in the Members Manual.

- DR