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.
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 Get that, turn on cartographic overlays (outdated scans but still useful), aerial imagery, download and import nhd data, pull up ngs website, and enjoy.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.
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.
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.
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?
mander.xyz
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