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Land Use Classification

Environmental

General

October, 2002

A  lot of geographic datasets are available only privately or on the web sites of local or state agencies, often for free.  We recommend Google for searching.  (Websites that maintain large lists of data links have difficulties staying current.)

Typically, you get what you pay for.  Quality, currency, download speed, service, enhancements (change of projection, clipping, and so on) will cost, yet prices tend to be very reasonable.  The largest distributors offer "loss leaders," including high quality free data, to attract and keep customers.

In the U.S., there are two places to start looking:

The MapMart at Directions Magazine.  The newest entrant.  Very competitive pricing.  Innovative interface.

The Geocommunity.  Extensive collection, always worth a look.

We are a minority owner of Directions Magazine.

Land Use Classification

November, 2001

David Bennett, of Windsor, California, has kindly supplied information related to land use classifications and their legends.  Here is the summary he posted to the ArcView list:

Thanks to Jim Scace, Dan Marrier, Pat Parsons, and Michael Hickey for their helpful responses to my question regarding land use legends.  My original question was:

I am wondering if anyone has any .avl files that are good for mapping land use?  Some of the land uses that I am looking to represent include vegetation, vineyards, orchards, misc. agriculture and urban areas. If anyone has any suggestions, they would be greatly appreciated.

Jim, Dan, Pat, and Michael each sent me .avl files.  Michael Hickey also sent helpful literature discussing cartographic issues related to illustrating land uses.

The page you are reading now provides access to the literature collected by Bennett.

The "helpful literature"

(Each of the following links will open in a new browser window.)

LandUseClassifications_1965.pdf: U.S. Department of Commerce, Standard Land Use Coding Manual: A Standard System for Identifying and Coding Land Use Activities.  First Edition, January 1965.  111 + ix pages, fair (barely readable) scanned copy in Adobe PDF format (about 1.9 MB).

http://www.planning.org/lbcs/2PUBS/ColorCoding/colorcodingcomplete.pdf: Sanjay Jeer and Barry Bain, American Planning Association, Traditional Color Coding for Land Uses (Draft), December 13, 1997.  High-quality color PDF document (85 KB).  This short paper describes and illustrates a "standard" color and shading method for presenting land use maps and surveys other "traditional" schemes.

http://www.planning.org/lbcs/: The Land-Based Classification Standards web page.

av_land.zip: A zipped collection of avl (ArcView 3.x legend) files (15 KB):

legend4_wo_outlines.avl - Pat Parsons
lu21_code.avl - Dan Marrier
landuse21.avl - Jim Scace
fullanduse.key - Jim Scace
All other files came from Michael Hickey. 

Bennet writes, "As far as I know, none of the avl files are copyrighted material."

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to David Bennett for collecting and summarizing this information.

Environmental Statistics

May, 2001

http://www.quantdec.com/envstats/data/ contains environmental data sets useful for testing theories and practicing statistical analyses.

http://www.quantdec.com/envstats/software/ provides Excel spreadsheets to perform various statistical analyses (including a few that are difficult to find anywhere, such as prediction and tolerance limits for the Normal distribution, computation of Finney's psi-function for lognormal MVUEs, tables of Land's H-statistics for computing lognormal confidence intervals, examples of statistical simulation with spreadsheets, and much more.

See http://www.quantdec.com/envstats/ for the complete set of environmental statistics pages available at quantdec.com.

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Last modified: Friday October 18, 2002.