<aside> 🌐 Contour maps are an extremely helpful resource to have when designing a farm. Luckily, due to technological advancements and government investments, the data to make your own contour maps is now widely available. Though data is not available everywhere in the country or the world, and its resolution can vary greatly by region, every year more and more regions are making this data accessible. For regions that do have publicly available Digital Elevation Models (DEM), using a free software like QGIS makes it easy to convert that raw data into a usable contour map.
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(2:45min)
(1:53min)
<aside> 🎞️ When the video freezes, it says to turn on the Processing Toolbox panel from the View→Panels dropdown. When it restarts, it is showing how to toggle the Processing Toolbox on and off directly from the toolbar
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(17:00min)
| State (w/hyperlink) | Resolution | Notes/Instructions |
|---|---|---|
| Pennsylvania | 1m (but units in ft) | |
| Vermont | .7m | have to do some annoying map switching to find the correct location on the tile map. Link here let’s you search but then pulls you to another map that does not let you search but is where you download the actual data from |
| Tennessee | 2.5ft | |
| Kentucky | 5ft | Search for address. click on tile. click View for Phase 1 Box Download url |
| New York | 1m/2m | |
| Hawaii | 10m | |
| General | National repository of GIS data. Not great but worth looking at if can’t find elsewhere | |
| Ohio | Had to use a different file type. will provide more instructions next time we have to do an Ohio map | |
| Washington | ||
| Massachusetts | 1m | Zoom to area you want to download. Click on the area. Click on the URL link and that will download a zip of an image file. Open the zip and then load the image into QGIS. |
| Website has data download instructions: https://www.mass.gov/info-details/massmapper-selector-data-download-instructions | ||
| Nebraska | 1m | |
| Maine | 1m | |
| Virginia | 1 ft | |
| Missouri | ||