12 June 2000
I've been working on maps for Alexia Smith, documenting (a) trails in the
Brushy Hills lands owned by the City of Lexington and (b) public and
semi-public lands in Rockbridge County. The former has been an opportunity
to start using GPS, and to develop some local uses for GIS
technologies. It's the usual struggle to figure out how to do things I
barely comprehend.
Here's a topographic map of the territory under consideration:
The diagonal line is a gas pipeline, quite clear in the images below.
An infrared view is more evocative:
And a transformation of the infrared data indicates some interesting
vegetation differences:
A mosaic of black and white orthophoto images (from Terraserver) reveals
patterns of trails
and some features are easily identified (springhouse in red circle, Union
Run Road in yellow, trails in green):
The trails found and mapped to date look like this:
and this is how they look on the topographic map:
There's lots more to be done --several trails appear (or seem to appear) on the orthophoto mosaic, and a number of features (clearings, apparent variations in vegetation) need exploration.