Abstract

GIS Conversion of Kansas Historical County Geology Maps
Track: Mining and Geosciences
Author(s): John Dunham

Surficial geology maps have been published for 98 of Kansas' 105 counties. Approximately half of these maps, however, are pre-GIS products of various ages and map scales, and many are out of print. ArcGIS Desktop 9 is used to georeference scanned versions of these maps. The maps are then screen-digitized and attributed in ArcGIS, yielding new digital versions of historical geologic mapping data that were previously unavailable. The digitized data for each county are fit to the geometry of the corresponding county in the statewide county base layer, allowing all these data to be used together, and with modern GIS data, for display and analysis. A new statewide color scheme based on that of the USGS is also developed for display consistency, with the symbology for each county geology feature class stored as cartographic representations in the corresponding geodatabase.

John Dunham
Kansas Geological Survey
University of Kansas
1930 Constant Avenue
Lawrence , Kansas 66047-3726
United States
Phone: 785-864-2148
Fax: 785-864-5317
E-mail: dunham@kgs.ku.edu