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24

okay, I finally got it. Thank you.

25

:sweat: :grinning: Again thank you

26

you’re welcome. if you ever need to create additional city/town places in iNat, i strongly encourage you to try following the suggestions i offered initially in this thread. in particular, knowing how to work with place boundaries from Census data is a generally useful skill, regardless of whether you’re interested biodiversity or policy or marketing, and that hopefully even a GIS newbie will be able to use that tutorial successfully.

27

tried again with the Moquah Barrens Wildlife Area, West of Moquah Barrens State Natural Area, for a project which looks at fungi of the Wisconsin Jack Pine areas https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/fungus-of-jack-pine-barrens-in-wisconsin

Tried explicitly following the instructions as you suggested and kept running into dead ends. Tried doing it on Google maps, but google maps only shows it as a point, not as an area with boundaries. Suggestions? Help?

28

it doesn’t look like anyone has already defined a polygon for MBWA in OpenStreetMaps. there’s only a single node that marks it. since Google gets many of its locations from OSM, that’s probably why you’re getting just a point in Google Maps.

Wisconsin DNR does have a GIS open data portal (https://dnr.wisconsin.gov/maps/GetGISData), but i don’t think that portal contains any boundaries for these kinds of places, or at least i don’t understand the data in that portal well enough to make out anything that seems like that it would offer boundaries.

so then looking for any information about MBWA in WI DNR’s website, it looks like this is the info page for it: https://dnr.wi.gov/topic/Lands/naturalareas/index.asp?SNA=83. that page offers only a PDF map (not boundaries electronic format), but it does provide a legal description for the property:

Within Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest, Bayfield County. T48N-R7W, Section 23. 616 acres.

so then using these instructions and this page, i translated the legal description to a set of coordinates:

  • 46.631295,-91.22045
  • 46.631327,-91.199733
  • 46.617066,-91.200087
  • 46.617187,-91.220364
  • 46.631295,-91.22045 (go back to the original point)

… and those points can be plugged into some simple KML text:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<kml xmlns="http://www.opengis.net/kml/2.2">
<Document id="root_doc">
<Folder><name>mbwa</name>
  <Placemark>
	<name>mbwa</name>
      <MultiGeometry><Polygon><outerBoundaryIs><LinearRing><coordinates>-91.22045,46.631295 -91.199733,46.631327 -91.200087,46.617066 -91.220364,46.617187 -91.22045,46.631295</coordinates></LinearRing></outerBoundaryIs></Polygon></MultiGeometry>
  </Placemark>
</Folder>
</Document></kml>

note these coordinates are just my best approximation based on the esri USGS Topo USA map. (when i calculated the area of my polygon in QGIS, it was 2475333 sq m, which translates to just under 612 acres, which is a few acres shy of the legal description’s 616 acres.) so if you think these coordinates might be off a bit, you can try using the instructions above to translate legal description to coordinates that you think are more accurate. (ideally, you would actually want someone on the ground to survey this, but that takes someone to be out there to do that.)

29

The KML you gave me is identical to the Moquah Barrens State Natural Area.

The place I am looking for is the Moquah Barrens Wildlife Management Area, which is pictured on page 8 of this document in yellow.

https://www.fs.fed.us/nrs/pubs/gtr/nrs_gtr_161.pdf

30

hmmm… i can’t find many online references to the WMA, and the only other map i can find for it is also a PDF map, with slightly different boundaries: https://www.bayfieldcounty.org/DocumentCenter/View/881/Moquah-Barrens-Auto-Tour. that was published by Bayfield county, but i don’t see anything obvious in their GIS open data portal that would provide the boundaries for that area. i also don’t see anything obvious in the USDA Forest Service open data that looks like boundaries for the place.

at this point, since those 2 PDF maps (from USDA FS and Bayfield county) seem to be the only 2 resources readily available on the web that seem to place the WMA on a map, i would just reach out to either the Bayfield county GIS guy (contact info on the county GIS portal) or somebody at the Forest Service GIS group to see if they can provide your the boundaries in KML or some other electronic format or otherwise point you to the data.

otherwise, you’ll just have to draw the boundary polygon yourself in a tool like Google Earth or QGIS. (sometimes, that’s just what you have to do, if the data is not available any other way.)

1 Like
31

thank you, I was already thinking of contacting the Forest Service.

32

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