Have you ever wanted to create your own maps, or integrate and visualize spatial datasets to examine changes in trends between locations and over time? Follow along with these training tutorials on QGIS, an open source geographic information system (GIS) and learn key concepts, procedures and skills for performing common GIS tasks – such as creating maps, as well as joining, overlaying and visualizing spatial datasets. These tutorials are geared towards new GIS users. We’ll start with foundational concepts, and build towards more advanced topics throughout – demonstrating how with a few relatively easy steps you can get quite a lot out of GIS. You can then extend these skills to datasets of thematic relevance to you in addressing tasks faced in your day-to-day work.

This resource contains the test data for the GeoServer OGC Web Services tutorials for various GIS applications including ArcGIS Pro, ArcMap, ArcGIS Story Maps, and QGIS. The contents of the data include a polygon shapefile, a polyline shapefile, a point shapefile, and a raster dataset; all of which pertain to the state of Utah, USA. The polygon shapefile is of every county in the state of Utah. The polyline is of every trail in the state of Utah. The point shapefile is the current list of GNIS place names in the state of Utah. The raster dataset covers a region in the center of the state of Utah. All datasets are projected to NAD 1983 Zone 12N.

Tool and data set of road networks for 80 of the most populated urban areas in the world. The data consist of a graph edge list for each city and two corresponding GIS shapefiles (i.e., links and nodes).Make your own data with our ArcGIS, QGIS, and python tools available at: http://csun.uic.edu/codes/GISF2E.htmlPlease cite: Karduni,A., Kermanshah, A., and Derrible, S., 2016, "A protocol to convert spatial polyline data to network formats and applications to world urban road networks", Scientific Data, 3:160046, Available at http://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201646

This Python script (Shape2DJI_Pilot_KML.py) will scan a directory, find all the ESRI shapefiles (.shp), reproject to EPSG 4326 (geographic coordinate system WGS84 ellipsoid), create an output directory and make a new Keyhole Markup Language (.kml) file for every line or polygon found in the files. These new *.kml files are compatible with DJI Pilot 2 on the Smart Controller (e.g., for M300 RTK). The *.kml files created directly by ArcGIS or QGIS are not currently compatible with DJI Pilot.

ArcGIS tool and tutorial to convert the shapefiles into network format. The latest version of the tool is available at http://csun.uic.edu/codes/GISF2E.htmlUpdate: we now have added QGIS and python tools. To download them and learn more, visit http://csun.uic.edu/codes/GISF2E.htmlPlease cite: Karduni,A., Kermanshah, A., and Derrible, S., 2016, "A protocol to convert spatial polyline data to network formats and applications to world urban road networks", Scientific Data, 3:160046, Available at http://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201646

This dataset corresponds to land area polygons of Australian coastline and surrounding islands. It was generated from 10 m Sentinel 2 imagery from 2022 - 2024 using the Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) to distinguish land from water. It was estimated from composite imagery made up from images where the tide is above the mean sea level. The coastline approximately corresponds to the mean high water level. This dataset was created as part of the NESP MaC 3.17 northern Australian Reef mapping project. It was developed to allow the inshore edge of digitised fringing reef features to be neatly clipped to the land areas without requiring manual digitisation of the neighbouring coastline. This required a coastline polygon with an edge positional error of below 50 m so as to not distort the shape of small fringing reefs. We found that existing coastline datasets such as the Geodata Coast 100K 2004 and the Australian Hydrographic Office (AHO) Australian land and coastline dataset did not meet our needs. The scale of the Geodata Coast 100K 2004 was too coarse to represent small islands and the the positional error of the Australian Hydrographic Office (AHO) Australian land and coastline dataset was too high (typically 80 m) for our application as the errors would have introduced significant errors in the shape of small fringing reefs. The Digital Earth Australia Coastline (GA) dataset was sufficiently accurate and detailed however the format of the data was unsuitable for our application as the coast was expressed as disconnected line features between rivers, rather than a closed polygon of the land areas. We did however base our approach on the process developed for the DEA coastline described in Bishop-Taylor et al., 2021 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2021.112734). Adapting it to our existing Sentinel 2 Google Earth processing pipeline. The difference between the approach used for the DEA coastline and this dataset was the DEA coastline performed the tidal calculations and filtering at the pixel level, where as in this dataset we only estimated a single tidal level for each whole Sentinel image scene. This was done for computational simplicity and to align with our existing Google Earth Engine image processing code. The images in the stack were sorted by this tidal estimate and those with a tidal high greater than the mean seal level were combined into the composite. The Sentinel 2 satellite follows a sun synchronous orbit and so does not observe the full range of tidal levels. This observed tidal range varies spatially due to the relative timing of peak tides with satellite image timing. We made no accommodation for variation in the tidal levels of the images used to calculate the coastline, other than selecting images that were above the mean tide level. This means tidal height that the dataset coastline corresponds to will vary spatially. While this approach is less precise than that used in the DEA Coastline the resulting errors were sufficiently low to meet the project goals.
This simplified approach was chosen because it integrated well with our existing Sentinel 2 processing pipeline for generating composite imagery. To verify the accuracy of this dataset we manually checked the generated coastline with high resolution imagery (ArcGIS World Imagery). We found that 90% of the coastline polygons in this dataset have a horizontal position error of less than 20 m when compared to high-resolution imagery, except for isolated failure cases. During our manual checks we identified some areas where our algorithm can lead to falsely identifying land or not identifying land. We identified specific scenarios, or 'failure modes,' where our algorithm struggled to distinguish between land and water. These are shown in the image "Potential failure modes": a) The coastline is pushed out due to breaking waves (example: western coast, S2 tile ID 49KPG). b) False land polygons are created because of very turbid water due to suspended sediment. In clear water areas the near infrared channel is almost black, starkly different to the bright land areas. In very highly turbid waters the suspended sediment appears in the near infrared channel, raising its brightness to a level where it starts to overlap with the brightness of the dimmest land features. (example: Joseph Bonaparte Gulf, S2 tile ID 52LEJ). This results in turbid rivers not being correctly mapped. In version 1-1 of the dataset the rivers across northern Australia were manually corrected for these failures. c) Very shallow, gentle sloping areas are not recognised as water and the coastline is pushed out (example: Mornington Island, S2 tile ID 54KUG). Update: A second review of this area indicated that the mapped coastline is likely to be very close to the try coastline. d) The coastline is lower than the mean high water level (example: Great Keppel (Wop-pa) Island, S2 tile ID 55KHQ). Some of these potential failure modes could probably be addressed in the future by using a higher resolution tide calculation and using adjusted NDWI thresholds per region to accommodate for regional differences. Some of these failure modes are likely due to the near infrared channel (B8) being able to penetrate the water approximately 0.5 m leading to errors in very shallow areas. Some additional failures include: - Interpreting jetties as land - Interpreting oil rigs as land - Bridges being interpreted as land, cutting off rivers Methods: The coastline polygons were created in four separate steps: 1. Create above mean sea level (AMSL) composite images. 2. Calculate the Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) and visualise as a grey scale image. 3. Generate vector polygons from the grey scale image using a NDWI threshold. 4. Clean up and merge polygons. To create the AMSL composite images, multiple Sentinel 2 images were combined using the Google Earth Engine. The core algorithm was: 1. For each Sentinel 2 tile filter the "COPERNICUS/S2_HARMONIZED" image collection by - tile ID - maximum cloud cover 20% - date between '2022-01-01' and '2024-06-30' - asset_size > 100000000 (remove small fragments of tiles) 2. Remove high sun-glint images (see "High sun-glint image detection" for more information). 3. Split images by "SENSING_ORBIT_NUMBER" (see "Using SENSING_ORBIT_NUMBER for a more balanced composite" for more information). 4. Iterate over all images in the split collections to predict the tide elevation for each image from the image timestamp (see "Tide prediction" for more information). 5. Remove images where tide elevation is below mean sea level. 6. Select maximum of 200 images with AMSL tide elevation. 7. Combine SENSING_ORBIT_NUMBER collections into one image collection. 8. Remove sun-glint and apply atmospheric correction on each image (see "Sun-glint removal and atmospheric correction" for more information). 9. Duplicate image collection to first create a composite image without cloud masking and using the 15th percentile of the images in the collection (i.e. for each pixel the 15th percentile value of all images is used). 10. Apply cloud masking to all images in the original image collection (see "Cloud Masking" for more information) and create a composite by using the 15th percentile of the images in the collection (i.e. for each pixel the 15th percentile value of all images is used). 11. Combine the two composite images (no cloud mask composite and cloud mask composite). This solves the problem of some coral cays and islands being misinterpreted as clouds and therefore creating holes in the composite image. These holes are "plugged" with the underlying composite without cloud masking. (Lawrey et al. 2022) Next, for each image the NDWI was calculated: 1. Calculate the normalised difference using the B3 (green) and B8 (near infrared). 2. Shift the value range from between -1 and +1 to values between 1 and 255 (0 reserved as no-data value). 3. Export image as 8 bit unsigned Integer grey scale image. During the next step, we generated vector polygons from the grey scale image using a NDWI threshold: 1. Upscale image to 5 m resolution using bilinear interpolation. This was to help smooth the coastline and reduce the error introduced by the jagged pixel edges. 2. Apply a threshold to create a binary image (see "NDWI Threshold" for more information) with the value 1 for land and 2 for water (0: no data). 3. Create polygons for land values (1) in the binary image. 4. Export as shapefile. Finally, we created a single layer from the vectorised images: 1. Merge and dissolve all vector layers in QGIS. 2. Perform smoothing (QGIS toolbox, Iterations 1, Offset 0.25, Maximum node angle to smooth 180). 3. Perform simplification (QGIS toolbox, tolerance 0.00003). 4. Remove polygon vertices on the inner circle to fill out the continental Australia. 5. Perform manual QA/QC. In this step we removed false polygons created due to sun glint and breaking waves. We also removed very small features (1 – 1.5 pixel sized features, e.g. single mangrove trees) by calculating the area of each feature (in m2) and removing features smaller than 200 m2. 15th percentile composite: The composite image was created using the 15th percentile of the pixels values in the image stack. The 15th percentile was chosen, in preference to the median, to select darker pixels in the stack as these tend to correspond to images with clearer water conditions and higher tides. High sun-glint image detection: Images with high sun-glint can lead to lower quality composite images. To determine high sun-glint images, a land mask was first applied to the image to only retain water pixels. This land mask was estimated using NDWI. The proportion of the water pixels in the near-infrared and short-wave infrared bands above a sun-glint threshold was calculated. Images with a high proportion were then filtered out of the image collection.
Sun-glint removal and atmospheric correction: The Top of Atmosphere L1

Amazon Geoglyphs Spatial Analysis Dataset

DATA & Tools

Data Overview and Sources

This dataset was constructed for the Phase 2 research described in the write-up document, analyzing the spatial relationships between geoglyphs (ancient earthwork structures) in the Amazon basin and hydrological environments to identify potential geoglyph locations.

Data sources

• HydroBASINS: www.hydrosheds.org - Global watershed boundaries
• GloRiC: www.hydrosheds.org - Global River Classification
• jqjacobs.net: Archaeogeodesy Placemarks (Amazon geoglyph category extracted from Google Earth KML)

File Structure

2_1_plan_research_area/
├── scripts/
│  └── kmz_point_extractor.py   # Data extraction script (Archaeogeodesy KMZ → geoglyph coordinates)
├── data/
│  ├── amazon_basin.gpkg     # Watershed boundaries (HydroBASINS Level 3 Amazon basin)
│  ├── amazon_gloric.gpkg     # River data (GloRiC clipped to basin extent)
│  ├── amazon_grid_gloric.gpkg  # Grid statistics (0.5° grid-based river environment statistics)
│  ├── sites_geoglyphs.gpkg    # Site locations (extracted geoglyph points)
│  ├── survey_area.gpkg      # Administrative areas (Brazil/Peru/Bolivia states of interest)
│  └── focus_area.gpkg      # Analysis area (potential geoglyph survey target region)
└── plan_research_area.qgz     # QGIS project (integrated layer management)

QGIS Processing Workflow

1. Watershed Boundary Extraction (amazon_basin.gpkg)

• (1) Vector → Research Tools → Select by Attribute: Select Amazon basin by attributes
• (2) Export → Save Selected Features As: Save selected features as new layer

2. River Data Clipping (amazon_gloric.gpkg)

• (1) Vector → Research Tools → Select by Location: Select GloRiC features intersecting with amazon_basin
• (2) Export → Save Selected Features As: Save selected river data
• (3) Vector → Data Management Tools → Add Geometry Attributes: Calculate river length

3. Grid-based Statistics Generation (amazon_grid_gloric.gpkg)

• (1) Vector → Research Tools → Create Grid: Create 0.5° interval grid
• (2) Vector → Research Tools → Select by Location: Select grids contained within amazon_basin
• (3) Vector → Analysis Tools → Join Attributes by Location (Summary): Calculate river characteristics statistics by grid
  • Aggregation functions: Mean, Standard Deviation
  • Target variables: Temp_min (minimum temperature), CMI_indx (climate moisture index), Log_elev (elevation)

4. Research Area Definition (survey_area.gpkg)

• (1) Vector → Research Tools → Select by Attribute: Select Amazon areas of interest from country-level state shapefiles
• (2) Export → Save Selected Features As: Save selected states as GPKG

5. Focus Research Area (focus_area.gpkg)

• (1) Layer → Create Layer → New Shapefile Layer: Create new polygon layer
• (2) Toggle Editing: Manually create rectangular polygon for potential geoglyph survey

This dataset serves as the foundation for Phase 2 research utilizing environmental filtering and Sentinel-2 multispectral analysis to identify potential geoglyph locations.

ps-places-metadata-v1.01

SUMMARY

This dataset comprises a pair of layers, (points and polys) which attempt to better locate "populated places" in NZ. Populated places are defined here as settled areas, either urban or rural where densitys of around 20 persons per hectare exist, and something is able to be seen from the air.

RATIONALE

The only liberally licensed placename dataset is currently LINZ geographic placenames, which has the following drawbacks: - coordinates are not place centers but left most label on 260 series map - the attributes are outdated

METHODOLOGY

This dataset necessarily involves cleaving the linz placenames set into two, those places that are poplulated, and those unpopulated. Work was carried out in four steps. First placenames were shortlisted according to the following criterion: - all places that rated at least POPL in the linz geographic places layer, ie POPL, METR or TOWN or USAT were adopted. - Then many additional points were added from a statnz meshblock density analysis.
- Finally remaining points were added from a check against linz residential polys, and zenbu poi clusters.

Spelling is broadly as per linz placenames, but there are differences for no particular reason. Instances of LINZ all upper case have been converted to sentance case. Some places not presently in the linz dataset are included in this set, usually new places, or those otherwise unnamed. They appear with no linz id, and are not authoritative, in some cases just wild guesses.

Density was derived from the 06 meshblock boundarys (level 2, geometry fixed), multipart conversion, merging in 06 usually resident MB population then using the formula pop/area*10000. An initial urban/rural threshold level of 0.6 persons per hectare was used.

Step two was to trace the approx extent of each populated place. The main purpose of this step was to determine the relative area of each place, and to create an intersection with meshblocks for population. Step 3 involved determining the political center of each place, broadly defined as the commercial center.

Tracing was carried out at 1:9000 for small places, and 1:18000 for large places using either bing or google satellite views. No attempt was made to relate to actual town 'boundarys'. For example large parks or raceways on the urban fringe were not generally included. Outlying industrial areas were included somewhat erratically depending on their connection to urban areas.

Step 3 involved determining the centers of each place. Points were overlaid over the following layers by way of a base reference:

a. original linz placenames b. OSM nz-locations points layer c. zenbu pois, latest set as of 5/4/11 d. zenbu AllSuburbsRegions dataset (a heavily hand modified) LINZ BDE extract derived dataset courtesy Zenbu. e. LINZ road-centerlines, sealed and highway f. LINZ residential areas, g. LINZ building-locations and building footprints h. Olivier and Co nz-urban-north and south

Therefore in practice, sources c and e, form the effective basis of the point coordinates in this dataset. Be aware that e, f and g are referenced to the LINZ topo data, while c and d are likely referenced to whatever roading dataset google possesses. As such minor discrepencys may occur when moving from one to the other.

Regardless of the above, this place centers dataset was created using the following criteria, in order of priority:

• attempts to represent the present (2011) subjective 'center' of each place as defined by its commercial/retail center ie. mainstreets where they exist, any kind of central retail cluster, even a single shop in very small places.
• the coordinate is almost always at the junction of two or more roads.
• most of the time the coordinate is at or near the centroid of the poi cluster
• failing any significant retail presence, the coordinate tends to be placed near the main road junction to the community.
• when the above criteria fail to yield a definitive answer, the final criteria involves the centroids of: . the urban polygons . the clusters of building footprints/locations.

To be clear the coordinates are manually produced by eye without any kind of computation. As such the points are placed approximately perhaps plus or minus 10m, but given that the roads layers are not that flash, no attempt was made to actually snap the coordinates to the road junctions themselves.

The final step involved merging in population from SNZ meshblocks (merge+sum by location) of popl polys). Be aware that due to the inconsistent way that meshblocks are defined this will result in inaccurate populations, particular small places will collect population from their surrounding area. In any case the population will generally always overestimate by including meshblocks that just nicked the place poly. Also there are a couple of dozen cases of overlapping meshblocks between two place polys and these will double count. Which i have so far made no attempt to fix.

Merged in also tla and regions from SNZ shapes, a few of the original linz atrributes, and lastly grading the size of urban areas according to SNZ 'urban areas" criteria. Ie: class codes:

1. Not used.
2. main urban area 30K+
3. secondary urban area 10k-30K
4. minor urban area 1k-10k
5. rural center 300-1K
6. village -300

Note that while this terminology is shared with SNZ the actual places differ owing to different decisions being made about where one area ends an another starts, and what constiutes a suburb or satellite. I expect some discussion around this issue. For example i have included tinwald and washdyke as part of ashburton and timaru, but not richmond or waikawa as part of nelson and picton. Im open to discussion on these.

No attempt has or will likely ever be made to locate the entire LOC and SBRB data subsets. We will just have to wait for NZFS to release what is thought to be an authoritative set.

PROJECTION

Shapefiles are all nztm. Orig data from SNZ and LINZ was all sourced in nztm, via koordinates, or SNZ. Satellite tracings were in spherical mercator/wgs84 and converted to nztm by Qgis. Zenbu POIS were also similarly converted.

ATTRIBUTES

Shapefile: Points id : integer unique to dataset name : name of popl place, string class : urban area size as above. integer tcode : SNZ tla code, integer rcode : SNZ region code, 1-16, integer area : area of poly place features, integer in square meters. pop : 2006 usually resident popluation, being the sum of meshblocks that intersect the place poly features. Integer lid : linz geog places id desc_code : linz geog places place type code

Shapefile: Polygons gid : integer unique to dataset, shared by points and polys name : name of popl place, string, where spelling conflicts occur points wins area : place poly area, m2 Integer

LICENSE

Clarification about the minorly derived nature of LINZ and google data needs to be sought. But pending these copyright complications, the actual points data is essentially an original work, released as public domain. I retain no copyright, nor any responsibility for data accuracy, either as is, or regardless of any changes that are subsequently made to it.

Peter Scott 16/6/2011

v1.01 minor spelling and grammar edits 17/6/11

This resource contains data inputs and a Jupyter Notebook that is used to introduce Hydrologic Analysis using Terrain Analysis Using Digital Elevation Models (TauDEM) and Python. TauDEM is a free and open-source set of Digital Elevation Model (DEM) tools developed at Utah State University for the extraction and analysis of hydrologic information from topography. This resource is part of a HydroLearn Physical Hydrology learning module available at https://edx.hydrolearn.org/courses/course-v1:Utah_State_University+CEE6400+2019_Fall/about

In this activity, the student learns how to (1) derive hydrologically useful information from Digital Elevation Models (DEMs); (2) describe the sequence of steps involved in mapping stream networks, catchments, and watersheds; and (3) compute an approximate water balance for a watershed-based on publicly available data.

Please note that this exercise is designed for the Logan River watershed, which drains to USGS streamflow gauge 10109000 located just east of Logan, Utah. However, this Jupyter Notebook and the analysis can readily be applied to other locations of interest. If running the terrain analysis for other study sites, you need to prepare a DEM TIF file, an outlet shapefile for the area of interest, and the average annual streamflow and precipitation data. - There are several sources to obtain DEM data. In the U.S., the DEM data (with different spatial resolutions) can be obtained from the National Elevation Dataset available from the national map (http://viewer.nationalmap.gov/viewer/). Another DEM data source is the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (https://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/), an international research effort that obtained digital elevation models on a near-global scale (search for Digital Elevation at https://www.usgs.gov/centers/eros/science/usgs-eros-archive-products-overview?qt-science_center_objects=0#qt-science_center_objects). - If not already available, you can generate the outlet shapefile by applying basic terrain analysis steps in geospatial information system models such as ArcGIS or QGIS. - You also need to obtain average annual streamflow and precipitation data for the watershed of interest to assess the annual water balance and calculate the runoff ratio in this exercise. In the U.S., the streamflow data can be obtained from the USGS NWIS website (https://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis) and the precipitation from PRISM (https://prism.oregonstate.edu/normals/). Note that using other datasets may require preprocessing steps to make data ready to use for this exercise.

Urban Tree Canopy Assessment. This was created using the Urban Tree Canopy Syracuse 2010 (All Layers) file HERE.The data for this map was created using LIDAR and other spatial analysis tools to identify and measure tree canopy in the landscape. This was a collaboration between the US Forest Service Northern Research Station (USFS), the University of Vermont Spatial Laboratory, and SUNY ESF. Because the full map is too large to be viewed in ArcGIS Online, this has been reduced to a vector tile layer to allow it to be viewed online. To download and view the shapefiles and all of the layers, you can download the data HERE and view this in either ArcGIS Pro or QGIS.Data DictionaryDescription source  USDA Forest ServiceList of values  Value 1 Description Tree CanopyValue 2 Description Grass/ShrubValue 3 Description Bare SoilValue 4 Description WaterValue 5 Description BuildingsValue 6 Description Roads/RailroadsValue 7 Description Other PavedField Class Alias Class Data type String Width 20Geometric objects  Feature class name landcover_2010_syracusecity Object type  complex Object count 7ArcGIS Feature Class Properties Feature class name landcover_2010_syracusecity Feature type  Simple Geometry type Polygon Has topology FALSE Feature count 7 Spatial index TRUE Linear referencing  FALSEDistributionAvailable format  Name ShapefileTransfer options  Transfer size 163.805Description Downloadable DataFieldsDetails for object landcover_2010_syracusecityType Feature Class Row count  7 Definition  UTCField FIDAlias FID Data type OID Width  4 Precision 0 Scale 0Field descriptionInternal feature number.Description source ESRIDescription of valueSequential unique whole numbers that are automatically generated.Field ShapeAlias Shape Data type Geometry Width 0 Precision 0 Scale 0Field description Feature geometry.Description source  ESRIDescription of values Coordinates defining the features.Field CodeAlias Code Data type Number Width 4Overview Description  Metadata DetailsMetadata language  English Metadata character set utf8 - 8 bit UCS Transfer FormatScope of the data described by the metadata  dataset Scope name  datasetLast update 2011-06-02ArcGIS metadata properties Metadata format ArcGIS 1.0 Metadata style North American Profile of ISO19115 2003Created in ArcGIS for the item 2011-06-02 16:48:35 Last modified in ArcGIS for the item 2011-06-02 16:44:43Automatic updates Have been performed Yes Last update 2011-06-02 16:44:43Item location history  Item copied or moved 2011-06-02 16:48:35 From T:\TestSites\NY\Syracuse\Temp\landcover_2010_syracusecity To \T7500\F$\Export\LandCover_2010_SyracuseCity\landcover_2010_syracusecity

The High Resolution Digital Elevation Model (HRDEM) product is derived from airborne LiDAR data (mainly in the south) and satellite images in the north. The complete coverage of the Canadian territory is gradually being established. It includes a Digital Terrain Model (DTM), a Digital Surface Model (DSM) and other derived data. For DTM datasets, derived data available are slope, aspect, shaded relief, color relief and color shaded relief maps and for DSM datasets, derived data available are shaded relief, color relief and color shaded relief maps. The productive forest line is used to separate the northern and the southern parts of the country. This line is approximate and may change based on requirements. In the southern part of the country (south of the productive forest line), DTM and DSM datasets are generated from airborne LiDAR data. They are offered at a 1 m or 2 m resolution and projected to the UTM NAD83 (CSRS) coordinate system and the corresponding zones. The datasets at a 1 m resolution cover an area of 10 km x 10 km while datasets at a 2 m resolution cover an area of 20 km by 20 km. In the northern part of the country (north of the productive forest line), due to the low density of vegetation and infrastructure, only DSM datasets are generally generated. Most of these datasets have optical digital images as their source data. They are generated at a 2 m resolution using the Polar Stereographic North coordinate system referenced to WGS84 horizontal datum or UTM NAD83 (CSRS) coordinate system. Each dataset covers an area of 50 km by 50 km. For some locations in the north, DSM and DTM datasets can also be generated from airborne LiDAR data. In this case, these products will be generated with the same specifications as those generated from airborne LiDAR in the southern part of the country. The HRDEM product is referenced to the Canadian Geodetic Vertical Datum of 2013 (CGVD2013), which is now the reference standard for heights across Canada. Source data for HRDEM datasets is acquired through multiple projects with different partners. Since data is being acquired by project, there is no integration or edgematching done between projects. The tiles are aligned within each project. The product High Resolution Digital Elevation Model (HRDEM) is part of the CanElevation Series created in support to the National Elevation Data Strategy implemented by NRCan. Collaboration is a key factor to the success of the National Elevation Data Strategy. Refer to the “Supporting Document” section to access the list of the different partners including links to their respective data.

This dataset contains municipal solar resource data, generated using the toscana tool. Dataset description Each file corresponds to a specific village. Two types of files are available in this dataset : a solar cadastre in raster format, representing the annual solar irradiation (in kWh/m²) received by the surfaces, and a file containing the average annual solar irradiation per building (in kWh/m²) in shapefile format. Study context This dataset was created within the frame of a study analyzing the impact of topography on rooftop solar potential. In this study, 92 French villages were simulated, that are located in the Alps and in the Rhône Valley. This study has made the object of a publication in Solar Energy, 2024, doi.org/10.1016/j.solener.2024.112632 To extend the research, the dataset was supplemented with 100 additional villages to investigate the combined effect of topography and local parameters, such as local climate, urban planning, dataset, and variations in topographic features. These other villages are located in the French Pyrenees, in mountainous regions of foreign countries (Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Germany) and in French lowland areas other than the Rhône Valley. The data are categorized by village, and villages are further classified based on their geographical location. French mountain villages are stored in the "Alps" or "Pyrenees" folders, while lowland villages are found in "Rhône_Valley" and "Other_plain_villages" folders. Foreign mountain villages are in the "Foreign_mountain_villages" folder and further subdivided by country. Methodology The metholodology used to obtain municipal solar resource data is described in detail in a publication ( https://doi.org/10.1016/j.solener.2024.112632) and in the documentation of the toscana package, available on GitHub at the following address : https://github.com/locie/toscana/tree/main/doc/_build. The BDTOPO database is used to retrieve the municipal boundaries and building footprints, while the EU-DEM database is used to provide the DEM. QGIS functions are used to process geographical data, create a DSM and divide the territory into tiles to reduce the computational time. Meteorological data (Typical Meteorological Year) are retrieved from PVGIS for each tile and averaged weather files are used in the simulations to account for the difference in spatial resolution between the tiles and the meteorological database. Solar energy simulations are conducted using the SEBE algorithm for each tile. Finally, QGIS functions are applied to process and generate the final output files.

Reason for Selection Protected natural areas in urban environments provide urban residents a nearby place to connect with nature and offer refugia for some species. They help foster a conservation ethic by providing opportunities for people to connect with nature, and also support ecosystem services like offsetting heat island effects (Greene and Millward 2017, Simpson 1998), water filtration, stormwater retention, and more (Hoover and Hopton 2019). In addition, parks, greenspace, and greenways can help improve physical and psychological health in communities (Gies 2006). Urban park size complements the equitable access to potential parks indicator by capturing the value of existing parks.Input DataSoutheast Blueprint 2024 extentFWS National Realty Tracts, accessed 12-13-2023Protected Areas Database of the United States(PAD-US):PAD-US 3.0 national geodatabase -Combined Proclamation Marine Fee Designation Easement, accessed 12-6-20232020 Census Urban Areas from the Census Bureau’s urban-rural classification; download the data, read more about how urban areas were redefined following the 2020 censusOpenStreetMap data “multipolygons” layer, accessed 12-5-2023A polygon from this dataset is considered a beach if the value in the “natural” tag attribute is “beach”. Data for coastal states (VA, NC, SC, GA, FL, AL, MS, LA, TX) were downloaded in .pbf format and translated to an ESRI shapefile using R code. OpenStreetMap® is open data, licensed under theOpen Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL) by theOpenStreetMap Foundation (OSMF). Additional credit to OSM contributors. Read more onthe OSM copyright page.2021 National Land Cover Database (NLCD): Percentdevelopedimperviousness2023NOAA coastal relief model: volumes 2 (Southeast Atlantic), 3 (Florida and East Gulf of America), 4 (Central Gulf of America), and 5 (Western Gulf of America), accessed 3-27-2024Mapping StepsCreate a seamless vector layer to constrain the extent of the urban park size indicator to inland and nearshore marine areas <10 m in depth. The deep offshore areas of marine parks do not meet the intent of this indicator to capture nearby opportunities for urban residents to connect with nature. Shallow areas are more accessible for recreational activities like snorkeling, which typically has a maximum recommended depth of 12-15 meters. This step mirrors the approach taken in the Caribbean version of this indicator.Merge all coastal relief model rasters (.nc format) together using QGIS “create virtual raster”.Save merged raster to .tif and import into ArcPro.Reclassify the NOAA coastal relief model data to assign areas with an elevation of land to -10 m a value of 1. Assign all other areas (deep marine) a value of 0.Convert the raster produced above to vector using the “RasterToPolygon” tool.Clip to 2024 subregions using “Pairwise Clip” tool.Break apart multipart polygons using “Multipart to single parts” tool.Hand-edit to remove deep marine polygon.Dissolve the resulting data layer.This produces a seamless polygon defining land and shallow marine areas.Clip the Census urban area layer to the bounding box of NoData surrounding the extent of Southeast Blueprint 2024.Clip PAD-US 3.0 to the bounding box of NoData surrounding the extent of Southeast Blueprint 2024.Remove the following areas from PAD-US 3.0, which are outside the scope of this indicator to represent parks:All School Trust Lands in Oklahoma and Mississippi (Loc Des = “School Lands” or “School Trust Lands”). These extensive lands are leased out and are not open to the public.All tribal and military lands (“Des_Tp” = "TRIBL" or “Des_Tp” = "MIL"). Generally, these lands are not intended for public recreational use.All BOEM marine lease blocks (“Own_Name” = "BOEM"). These Outer Continental Shelf lease blocks do not represent actively protected marine parks, but serve as the “legal definition for BOEM offshore boundary coordinates...for leasing and administrative purposes” (BOEM).All lands designated as “proclamation” (“Des_Tp” = "PROC"). These typically represent the approved boundary of public lands, within which land protection is authorized to occur, but not all lands within the proclamation boundary are necessarily currently in a conserved status.Retain only selected attribute fields from PAD-US to get rid of irrelevant attributes.Merged the filtered PAD-US layer produced above with the OSM beaches and FWS National Realty Tracts to produce a combined protected areas dataset.The resulting merged data layer contains overlapping polygons. To remove overlapping polygons, use the Dissolve function.Clip the resulting data layer to the inland and nearshore extent.Process all multipart polygons (e.g., separate parcels within a National Wildlife Refuge) to single parts (referred to in Arc software as an “explode”).Select all polygons that intersect the Census urban extent within 0.5 miles. We chose 0.5 miles to represent a reasonable walking distance based on input and feedback from park access experts. Assuming a moderate intensity walking pace of 3 miles per hour, as defined by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service’s physical activity guidelines, the 0.5 mi distance also corresponds to the 10-minute walk threshold used in the equitable access to potential parks indicator.Dissolve all the park polygons that were selected in the previous step.Process all multipart polygons to single parts (“explode”) again.Add a unique ID to the selected parks. This value will be used in a later step to join the parks to their buffers.Create a 0.5 mi (805 m) buffer ring around each park using the multiring plugin in QGIS. Ensure that “dissolve buffers” is disabled so that a single 0.5 mi buffer is created for each park.Assess the amount of overlap between the buffered park and the Census urban area using “overlap analysis”. This step is necessary to identify parks that do not intersect the urban area, but which lie within an urban matrix (e.g., Umstead Park in Raleigh, NC and Davidson-Arabia Mountain Nature Preserve in Atlanta, GA). This step creates a table that is joined back to the park polygons using the UniqueID.Remove parks that had ≤10% overlap with the urban areas when buffered. This excludes mostly non-urban parks that do not meet the intent of this indicator to capture parks that provide nearby access for urban residents. Note: The 10% threshold is a judgement call based on testing which known urban parks and urban National Wildlife Refuges are captured at different overlap cutoffs and is intended to be as inclusive as possible.Calculate the GIS acres of each remaining park unit using the Add Geometry Attributes function.Buffer the selected parks by 15 m. Buffering prevents very small and narrow parks from being left out of the indicator when the polygons are converted to raster.Reclassify the parks based on their area into the 7 classes seen in the final indicator values below. These thresholds were informed by park classification guidelines from the National Recreation and Park Association, which classify neighborhood parks as 5-10 acres, community parks as 30-50 acres, and large urban parks as optimally 75+ acres (Mertes and Hall 1995).Assess the impervious surface composition of each park using the NLCD 2021 impervious layer and the Zonal Statistics “MEAN” function. Retain only the mean percent impervious value for each park.Extract only parks with a mean impervious pixel value <80%. This step excludes parks that do not meet the intent of the indicator to capture opportunities to connect with nature and offer refugia for species (e.g., the Superdome in New Orleans, LA, the Astrodome in Houston, TX, and City Plaza in Raleigh, NC).Extract again to the inland and nearshore extent.Export the final vector file to a shapefile and import to ArcGIS Pro.Convert the resulting polygons to raster using the ArcPy Feature to Raster function and the area class field.Assign a value of 0 to all other pixels in the Southeast Blueprint 2024 extent not already identified as an urban park in the mapping steps above. Zero values are intended to help users better understand the extent of this indicator and make it perform better in online tools.Use the land and shallow marine layer and “extract by mask” tool to save the final version of this indicator.Add color and legend to raster attribute table.As a final step, clip to the spatial extent of Southeast Blueprint 2024.Note: For more details on the mapping steps, code used to create this layer is available in theSoutheast Blueprint Data Downloadunder > 6_Code. Final indicator valuesIndicator values are assigned as follows:6= 75+ acre urban park5= 50 to <75 acre urban park4= 30 to <50 acre urban park3= 10 to <30 acre urban park2=5 to <10acreurbanpark1 = <5 acre urban park0 = Not identified as an urban parkKnown IssuesThis indicator does not include park amenities that influence how well the park serves people and should not be the only tool used for parks and recreation planning. Park standards should be determined at a local level to account for various community issues, values, needs, and available resources.This indicator includes some protected areas that are not open to the public and not typically thought of as “parks”, like mitigation lands, private easements, and private golf courses. While we experimented with excluding them using the public access attribute in PAD, due to numerous inaccuracies, this inadvertently removed protected lands that are known to be publicly accessible. As a result, we erred on the side of including the non-publicly accessible lands.The NLCD percent impervious layer contains classification inaccuracies. As a result, this indicator may exclude parks that are mostly natural because they are misclassified as mostly impervious. Conversely, this indicator may include parks that are mostly impervious because they are misclassified as mostly

Reason for SelectionProtected natural areas in urban environments provide urban residents a nearby place to connect with nature and offer refugia for some species. Because beaches in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands are open to the public, beaches also provide important outdoor recreation opportunities for urban residents, so we include beaches as parks in this indicator.Input DataSoutheast Blueprint 2023 subregions: CaribbeanSoutheast Blueprint 2023 extentNational Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) Coastal Relief Model, accessed 11-22-2022Protected Areas Database of the United States (PAD-US) 3.0: VI, PR, and Marine Combined Fee EasementPuerto Rico Protected Natural Areas 2018 (December 2018 update): Terrestrial and marine protected areas (PACAT2018_areas_protegidasPR_TERRESTRES_07052019.shp, PACAT2018_areas_protegidasPR_MARINAS_07052019.shp) 2020 Census Urban Areas from the Census Bureau’s urban-rural classification; download the data, read more about how urban areas were redefined following the 2020 censusOpenStreetMap data “multipolygons” layer, accessed 3-14-2023A polygon from this dataset is considered a park if the “leisure” tag attribute is either “park” or “nature_reserve”, and considered a beach if the value in the “natural” tag attribute is “beach”. OpenStreetMap describes leisure areas as “places people go in their spare time” and natural areas as “a wide variety of physical geography, geological and landcover features”. Data were downloaded in .pbf format and translated ton an ESRI shapefile using R code. OpenStreetMap® is open data, licensed under the Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL) by the OpenStreetMap Foundation (OSMF). Additional credit to OSM contributors. Read more on the OSM copyright page. TNC Lands - Public Layer, accessed 3-8-2023U.S. Virgin Islands beaches layer (separate vector layers for St. Croix, St. Thomas, and St. John) provided by Joe Dwyer with Lynker/the NOAA Caribbean Climate Adaptation Program on 3-3-2023 (contact jdwyer@lynker.com for more information)Mapping StepsMost mapping steps were completed using QGIS (v 3.22) Graphical Modeler.Fix geometry errors in the PAD-US PR data using Fix Geometry. This must be done before any analysis is possible.Merge the terrestrial PR and VI PAD-US layers.Use the NOAA coastal relief model to restrict marine parks (marine polygons from PAD-US and Puerto Rico Protected Natural Areas) to areas shallower than 10 m in depth. The deep offshore areas of marine parks do not meet the intent of this indicator to capture nearby opportunities for urban residents to connect with nature.Merge into one layer the resulting shallow marine parks from marine PAD-US and the Puerto Rico Protected Natural Areas along with the combined terrestrial PAD-US parks, OpenStreetMap, TNC Lands, and USVI beaches. Omit from the Puerto Rico Protected Areas layer the “Zona de Conservación del Carso”, which has some policy protections and conservation incentives but is not formally protected.Fix geometry errors in the resulting merged layer using Fix Geometry.Intersect the resulting fixed file with the Caribbean Blueprint subregion.Process all multipart polygons to single parts (referred to in Arc software as an “explode”). This helps the indicator capture, as much as possible, the discrete units of a protected area that serve urban residents.Clip the Census urban area to the Caribbean Blueprint subregion.Select all polygons that intersect the Census urban extent within 1.2 miles (1,931 m). The 1.2 mi threshold is consistent with the average walking trip on a summer day (U.S. DOT 2002) used to define the walking distance threshold used in the greenways and trails indicator. Note: this is further than the 0.5 mi distance used in the continental version of the indicator. We extended it to capture East Bay and Point Udall based on feedback from the local conservation community about the importance of the park for outdoor recreation.Dissolve all the park polygons that were selected in the previous step.Process all multipart polygons to single parts (“explode”) again.Add a unique ID to the selected parks. This value will be used to join the parks to their buffers.Create a 1.2 mi (1,931 m) buffer ring around each park using the multiring buffer plugin in QGIS. Ensure that “dissolve buffers” is disabled so that a single 1.2 mi buffer is created for each park.Assess the amount of overlap between the buffered park and the Census urban area using overlap analysis. This step is necessary to identify parks that do not intersect the urban area, but which lie within an urban matrix. This step creates a table that is joined back to the park polygons using the UniqueID.Remove parks that had ≤2% overlap with the urban areas when buffered. This excludes mostly non-urban parks that do not meet the intent of this indicator to capture parks that provide nearby access for urban residents. Note: In the continental version of this indicator, we used a threshold of 10%. In the Caribbean version, we lowered this to 2% in order to capture small parks that dropped out of the indicator when we extended the buffer distance to 1.2 miles.Calculate the GIS acres of each remaining park unit using the Add Geometry Attributes function.Join the buffer attribute table to the previously selected parks, retaining only the parks that exceeded the 2% urban area overlap threshold while buffered. Buffer the selected parks by 15 m. Buffering prevents very small parks and narrow beaches from being left out of the indicator when the polygons are converted to raster.Reclassify the polygons into 7 classes, seen in the final indicator values below. These thresholds were informed by park classification guidelines from the National Recreation and Park Association, which classify neighborhood parks as 5-10 acres, community parks as 30-50 acres, and large urban parks as optimally 75+ acres (Mertes and Hall 1995).Export the final vector file to a shapefile and import to ArcGIS Pro.Convert the resulting polygons to raster using the ArcPy Polygon to Raster function. Assign values to the pixels in the resulting raster based on the polygon class sizes of the contiguous park areas.Clip to the Caribbean Blueprint 2023 subregion.As a final step, clip to the spatial extent of Southeast Blueprint 2023. Note: For more details on the mapping steps, code used to create this layer is available in the Southeast Blueprint Data Download under > 6_Code. Final indicator valuesIndicator values are assigned as follows:6 = 75+ acre urban park5 = >50 to <75 acre urban park4 = 30 to <50 acre urban park3 = 10 to <30 acre urban park2 = 5 to <10 acre urban park1 = <5 acre urban park0 = Not identified as an urban parkKnown IssuesThis indicator does not include park amenities that influence how well the park serves people and should not be the only tool used for parks and recreation planning. Park standards should be determined at a local level to account for various community issues, values, needs, and available resources. This indicator includes some protected areas that are not open to the public and not typically thought of as “parks”, like mitigation lands, private easements, and private golf courses. While we experimented with excluding them using the public access attribute in PAD, due to numerous inaccuracies, this inadvertently removed protected lands that are known to be publicly accessible. As a result, we erred on the side of including the non-publicly accessible lands.This indicator includes parks and beaches from OpenStreetMap, which is a crowdsourced dataset. While members of the OpenStreetMap community often verify map features to check for accuracy and completeness, there is the potential for spatial errors (e.g., misrepresenting the boundary of a park) or incorrect tags (e.g., labelling an area as a park that is not actually a park). However, using a crowdsourced dataset gives on-the-ground experts, Blueprint users, and community members the power to fix errors and add new parks to improve the accuracy and coverage of this indicator in the future.Other Things to Keep in MindThis indicator calculates the area of each park using the park polygons from the source data. However, simply converting those park polygons to raster results in some small parks and narrow beaches being left out of the indicator. To capture those areas, we buffered parks and beaches by 15 m and applied the original area calculation to the larger buffered polygon, so as not to inflate the area by including the buffer. As a result, when the buffered polygons are rasterized, the final indicator has some areas of adjacent pixels that receive different scores. While these pixels may appear to be part of one contiguous park or suite of parks, they are scored differently because the park polygons themselves are not actually contiguous. The Caribbean version of this indicator uses a slightly different methodology than the continental Southeast version. It includes parks within a 1.2 mi distance from the Census urban area, compared to 0.5 mi in the continental Southeast. We extended it to capture East Bay and Point Udall based on feedback from the local conservation community about the importance of the park for outdoor recreation. Similarly, this indicator uses a 2% threshold of overlap between buffered parks and the Census urban areas, compared to a 10% threshold in the continental Southeast. This helped capture small parks that dropped out of the indicator when we extended the buffer distance to 1.2 miles. Finally, the Caribbean version does not use the impervious surface cutoff applied in the continental Southeast because the landcover data available in the Caribbean does not assess percent impervious in a comparable way.Disclaimer: Comparing with Older Indicator VersionsThere are numerous problems with using Southeast Blueprint