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11415 NE 128th St, Suite 110
Kirkland, WA 98034
T (425) 820-3420
F (425) 820-3437
info@INFOrestry.com
"We actually made a map of the country, on a scale of a mile to the mile!"
"Have you used it much?" I enquired.
"It has never been spread out, yet," said Mein Herr;
"the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight!
So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well."
Lewis Carroll
Silvie and Bruno, 1889
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Modern Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have revolutionized the field of cartography.
Prior to the late 1980's, high quality cartography was performed using labor intensive manual techniques such as negative
scribing on coated Mylar sheets. Individual text labels were created by a typesetter and then pasted to registered sheets.
Area fills, like the blue shading of lakes, were each carefully cut from registered opaque Myar film.
The separate layers, sometimes 10 or 20 or them, were photographically combined into color composites which were
then used to print a final map. The only product was a single map. Making a different version of the map required more separates,
more composites and another trip to the printer.
With GIS, spatial data are digitized as geographic coordinates in the form of lines, polygons, points, and annotations.
Once information is captured, it can be used over and over to build maps of many themes, layouts, and scales.
With standardized data formats, it's easily shared between users further reducing labor and redundancy.
Small volume maps are now more likely printed digitally on an in-house printer or shared electronically via the
Internet as a PDF or other image file. High quality maps and larger print runs are still produced on offset printers, but the color
separation process is automated using a computer.
Although GIS has greatly changed the mapping industry with new capabilities,
good cartography is still just as important as it ever was. INFO prides itself on producing easy to read, high quality maps.
Below are some recent samples.
Map Gallery
Click to enlarge (808kb) |
Average annual precipitation in Washington ranges from over 200 inches on the windward slopes
Olympic Mountains to about 5 inches in the rain shadow of the Cascade Range. This map uses NOAA
data to illustrate this vast difference in rainfall. |
Click to enlarge (639kb) |
Part of a map series created to support a vegetation management plan developed by INFO for Seattle's Seward Park. |
Click to enlarge (873kb) |
Forest cover type and base planimetric GIS data were overlain onto a color aerial photo
to create this map. The photo was georeferenced to the map coordinate system but was not
orthorectified to remove geometric distortion caused by camera geometery and topography. |
 Click to enlarge (544 kb) |
Forest fires have a significant impact on forest ecology.
This map shows the date and extents of the most recent fires within a watershed. |
Click to enlarge (267 kb) |
The Pacific Northwest Trail starts at the Continental Divide in Montana and runs 1200 miles
to the Pacific Ocean at Cape Alava, Washington. This map was created for the 2001 edition of
the Pacific Northwest Trail Guide, Ron Strickland and maps by Ted Hitzroth,
Sasquatch Books, Seattle.
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