Abstract - Two Years and 163,570 Quads Later ...The National Wetlands Inventory on the Internet

Track: Information Access and the Internet

Herman Robinson
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
9720 Executive Center Drive Suite 101
St. Petersburg, FL 33702

Telephone: 813-570-5400
Fax: 813-570-5420
E-mail: herman@klingon.nwi.fws.gov

Bill Wilen

Two Years and 163,570 Quads Later ...The National Wetlands Inventory on the Internet

Defining Issue: The National Wetlands Inventory (NWI) needed an economical, efficient, and fast way to distribute its digital wetland map data to the GIS community. GIS Solution: NWI converted all its digital wetland maps to DLG-Optional format and placed them on an anonymous ftp Internet server. Methodology: The National Wetlands Inventory now provides for downloading over 18,000 wetland maps, in DLG-Optional format on the Internet. ArcInfo AMLs are also provided to automate conversion from DLG to ArcInfo coverages. NWI provides a script and short exercise to convert the DLGs to ArcView GIS shapefiles. This has been a tremendously successful program with over 163,000 map data files downloaded in the first two years. Software: The digital data are captured using in-house digitizing software called Wetland Analytical Mapping Software (WAMS). The data are delivered over the Internet using anonymous ftp in DLG format. All in-house custom products, custom maps, status maps, and so forth are produced using ArcInfo, ArcView, ArcPress and Oracle RDBMS.