Not a lot of activity around here lately...let's liven it up, guys! Wake up out there! Spring's gonna be a-comin' soon!
IOWATER volunteers will already be familiar with the Water Monitoring Atlas and Watershed Atlas, but another interesting mapping resource is the Iowa Geographic Map Server. It provides the recent aerial photos and land use and other maps that are available on the water monitoring and watershed atlas websites, but you can also get some older aerial photos, which is why I'm sharing it here.
The older photos vary in date, but are from the 1990's - for example, around the Des Moines area they are from 1990, but up in Boone County they are from about 1997. But still, if you are looking at the current aerial view of a site and want to know what it looked like in the past, it can be handy to be able to go back and see what the area looked like ten or fifteen years ago and answer some questions. "Was that housing development here yet", for example, or "Was that cornfield coming right up the creek bank ten year ago, too, or is that something more recent"?
For those of you in the Ames area, there are also aerial photos available from 1939, so you can even compare current photos to how the area looked over 65 years ago.
http://cairo.gis.iastate.edu/
Best way I've found to use it is to click on "index map" and then from the index map click on the county you want and go from there. With a little experimentation it's not too hard to figure out. |
Iowa Geographic Map Server
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Posted - 01/12/2005 : 12:37:51 PM 
