Posted by: "Martyn Stewart"
> What I am attempting to do is log all sightings with my metadata and show
> abundance maps for my information.
>
> I have a huge project coming up with bats and frogs; I want to be able to
> fill in each county and state as to their whereabouts and patterns.
>
> Not unlike your frog county maps..
As has been suggested, one of the GIS programs would be the sort of
thing you are looking for. The biggest problem with GIS systems is that
the software is not very user friendly. But if you have lots of data
that's frequently changing that's the way to go. There's probably a
cartography group at UW that you might find it useful to talk to.
I did find my old program, it's basically a GIS program from 20 years
ago. It originally came with census data from 1980. Surprisingly it will
run in classic in OSX, so I can generate maps with it using my G4
desktop. It won't run in my intel based MacBook Pro (classic was
dropped). I don't think it's been updated beyond what I have, It was
called MapMaker and the version I have is from 1989 (version 4.01). As I
said they are vector maps, not a big problem if you have a mac vector
graphics program like Canvas, or Illustrator. It will save the maps in
PICT format, or I can get a Postscript file out of it using the mac
print routines. Of course I can convert the vector files to bitmaps.
The maps on my frog pages came originally from MapMaker. I scaled them
to the size I wanted and then turned them into gif format so they would
work easily in html. I update them with the paint bucket and pencil in
photoshop, a hand job on each one. Not a problem with the number of maps
involved as the data does not change rapidly.
If you need a custom map, say like the western states, or even
individual states I can generate it as well as whole US. It only will do
the counties in one map projection, one it calls latitude/longitude. It
has the whole world's data, so any area can be generated.
You might want to go off and research in Filemaker's site, or groups
dealing with it. There may already be a GIS interface setup available
for Filemaker. I have the latest version but I don't think it comes with
more than being able to select pictures. But a lot has been developed to
work with the program. Only GIS capable program I have is Canvas, and
that's just for the maps, not the data.
Walt
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