North Ronaldsay UK - Wow! Take A Look At 'Dem Labels
North Ronaldsay Study
Let's begin this post by giving credit, where credit is due. My first attempt at shorelines for North Ronaldsay were extracted from imagery taken from MS Live Local. It appeared to be cloud-free Landsat imagery, but I'm not certain. The first attempt to map this island's shoreline resulted in very rough lines. These shorelines were "okay".
Intrepid searcher that I am, I began to scour the Internet for mapping of North Ronaldsay. The usual cast of characters showed up, but nothing great. That is until I discovered Get-A-Map, which uses Ordinance Survey raster map images. I believe the original maps were at 1:50,000 scale. I found another treasure trove of maps, text and images from a Scottish outfit called SCAPE. They do surveys of Scottish island shorelines to determine the identity and quality of archeological sites within 50-meters, or so, of the waterline. Their publications are available for free. Included is the Ordinance Survey maps (1:50,000) for the islands. In my case, all of the Orkney Islands, most especially North Ronaldsay.
My purpose is to produce the highest quality shoreline map of each island I study. In doing my work I pull imagery and data from a wide variety of public sources - Landsat, WVS, PGS, GNIS, and others. I always give credit to my sources and am keenly aware of copyrights. In this study I have extracted names of island settlements, features and hydro features from the Ordinance Survey 1:50,000. The shorelines were digitized from the same Ordinance Survey imagery used in the SCAPE study referenced earlier. With that all said, let's move on.
The first series of Marplot maps are derived from the MS Live Local imagery. As I stated, it gave me "okay" shorelines, but they were not up to EVS quality. All maps after the Get-A-Map image were derived from Ordinance Survey georectified imagery. Once loaded and georectified in Global Mapper, I digitized my new shorelines. They were great. They took the MS Live Local shorelines and finished them. I took most of my names for settlements, features and hydro features from the Ordinance Survey work. The 2nd series of maps also used a text entry feature within Marplot to pretty-up the labels. I really like the end product.
This project has taken about six to eight hours of work. I believe it is worth the effort. My only gripe concerns the text labels - they act like raster images when zooming. I can reselect them and shrink or expand them as needed, but that is a clumsy process when your map is loaded with labels. This is where the more complete mapping packages distance themselves from Marplot. Oh well, so goes life.
Enjoy!
Labels: EVS, Get-A-Map, Global Mapper, island, Landsat, Marplot, MS Live Local, Orkneys
