Prom maps

Tidal River Map by Will Hore-Lacy
Region around Tidal River
Wilsons Promontory is a beautiful national park in Victoria, Australia and actually contains the southern most point of the mainland. It is know for its beaches, camping, hiking and generally just being a nice place to visit.  While it is almost impossible to get lost there, I do love a good map and they do come in handy...

Background

I started making maps when I discovered there was a wealth of data on the data.vic.gov.au site and a friend mentioned needing some maps to go fly fishing. So I downloaded some data and set about putting something together.
The first maps were not great, it was rather hard developing layer styles that work well together but it was a good starting point and a proof of concept.

Tidal River photo by Will Hore-Lacy
Tidal River looking towards Mt Ramsay
Not long after that I decided to put together some maps to do the Coast to Coast in England based on UK Ordinance Survey data.  One of the really nice thing about this data is that they also offered style files for the layers which gave me a few ideas for when I returned home..

These Prom maps were the first time I put together some fairly complete map styles that I was happy with.  It took a while to find all the data I needed but I can now re-use it in a number of other maps/regions.



Software and process

All the maps I put together are made with QGIS open source software. Sadly I don't have the cash to splash around on an ArcGIS license but fortunately I can make QGIS do just about everything I could want from ArcGIS.  Particularly now I can add a little R spatial processing into the mix...

Map of North East of Wilsons Promontory by Will Hore-Lacy
North East of the Prom
The maps are made by loading a number of spatial data layers and then styling and labeling them into something that makes sense.  The map images are then produced using the print composer to add a grid, scale and legend and exported as a high resolution .tiff.

Unfortunately QGIS can't export geoTIFFs or geoPDFs directly from the print composer so the exported image now needs to be geocoded, fortunately this is pretty easy now that the image has a grid on it. After the geocoded points have been added, the file gets processed as an uncompressed geoTIFF, so you still have a huge file on your hands. After some searching I found a way to apply jpeg compression to the TIFF and maintain it's geocoded form using GDAL and a simple line of code in the command line.

And that's it, I load the maps into dropbox so they can be easily added to Avenza maps to use on my tablets.

Let me know if you would like additional details about any part of the process.

Tidal River photo from Mt Oberon by Will Hore-Lacy
Tidal River from Mt Oberon

Disclaimer

I haven't checked the data for accuracy and there are a few issues with naming of tracks etc. Please use them if you like them, I think they are pretty accurate, but use at your own risk.

Download Maps

Prom South - updated 13/1/2019 
Prom North - updated 13/1/2019

Updates

13/1/2019 - Added tree density

 Sources

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