e-Atlas Update: Introducing the Bright Earth e-Atlas Basemap - Eric Lawrey

e-Atlas Update: Introducing the Bright Earth e-Atlas Basemap - Eric Lawrey

The Bright Earth e-Atlas Basemap is an improved basemap that focuses on Queensland, highlighting the natural environment and the areas of human influence rather than the traditional roadmap available from Google Maps. With this basemap we wanted to show off the Great Barrier Reef, its river catchments, the wet tropics rainforests and the Torres Strait.

The e-Atlas developed a popular basemap several years ago, however its low resolution made it unsuitable for use with many of the new high resolution datasets now available on the e-Atlas and elsewhere. The eReefs Water Quality Dashboard team are using this old basemap and requested a new higher resolution version be created. This new basemap will also become the starting point for an even higher resolution version for the Torres Strait, it will be one of the key features of the Torres Strait e-Atlas.

The new Bright Earth basemap is most detailed along the Queensland coastline at scale of 1:250k nestled seamlessly within a global map at a scale of 1:2M. This allows the e-Atlas users to zoom in and out without ever noticing the boundary of the high resolution map.

The new Bright Earth basemap was compiled mainly from open access datasets which will allow the basemap and its components to be made freely available to others. The following datasets were used: Natural Earth Data, Blue Marble Next Generation (NASA), VMap0, gbr100 (JCU), GBR Features (GBRMPA), QLUMP Landuse (DSITIA), OpenStreetMap (CloudMap), Coast100k (GA), Gulf of Papua Bathymetry (GA), STRM30 Plus (UCSD).

The new basemap will be available on the e-Atlas website, http://maps.e-atlas.org.au, from the 22nd Aug 2013.

For further information contact: e.lawrey@aims.gov.au

Project: 13.1 e-Atlas

 

 

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