Greetings, Tweets --

For those of you who are into correlating bird observations with
gross habitat types, my employer (the Wash. Dep't of Ecology) has
recently posted to its web site land use/land cover maps of the
entire state. Here's where we get into the jargon of bureau-/techno-
babble. On the other hand, the maps are both useful and beautiful,
especially if you are into geographic mapping.

The maps are presented by WRIAs (Water Resource Inventory Areas)
which are more-or-less synonymous with river basins. There are some
sixty WRIAs in the state (as compared with 39 counties.

Land use/land cover is a jargon which expresses land use types (e.g.
various degrees of urbanization) and land cover (e.g. gross habitat
types).

I think they're pretty cool (ok - I'm of the 60s) simply as
geographic art, as well as being functional.

Here's the original announcement with access information:

> Dear Ecology Staff:
>
> Mike Woodall has created another set of WRIA Maps using Land Cover
> as the theme. They are in PDF format.
>
> These maps are available to Ecology staff and the general public at:
>
> http://www.ecy.wa.gov/services/gis/maps/wria/lc/lcpdf.htm
>
> . ______________
> ____ | | RICH KIM, Spatial Database Administrator
> \ | | | Washington State Department of Ecology
> | // | P.O. Box 47600, Olympia, Washington USA 98504
> | * Olympia |
> \ _____|
> `---------' http://www.ecy.wa.gov/services/gis/index.html
>
------- End of forwarded message -------

One caveat: the individual Adobe Acrobat WRIA map files are each
about a megabyte, so if you're using a modem connection think twice
about what your're about to do.


*****************************
Douglas Canning
Olympia, Washington
dcanning at nisquallyestuary.org
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