Google Earth
The latest and most exciting tool in the GIS space is Google Earth (“GE”). It’s brand new, and no doubt will add features in the future. At this point, it’s primarily useful for two things: “armchair exploration”, and getting driving directions. (It's also free for non-commercial use, making it just about the best deal on the planet. You will need a broadband connection, however).
Currently, GE doesn’t label or index very many physical or stream features (it’s OK with ponds and lakes). So it has to be used in combination with other services.
In GE, you start by entering a longitude and latitude in the search line, and the system “flies” right to the spot. A nice feature is that it’s smart enough to figure out and parse different formats. You can enter decimal degree coordinates directly (as we did, just by cutting and pasting them out of MapCard), or Degree/Minute/Second coordinates. Just enter them, GE will figure them out. Immediately you fly into the view shown:
The real power of the system comes from its integration with a 3-D terrain model. You can tilt and rotate the view at will. In the next view, we shifted the viewpoint back a little, tilted the image, and rotated it (note north on the screen compass points to the bottom of the screen). Now we’re looking up the Yokum Brook drainage.
In addition, you can have the system generate driving directions for you, just by right clicking on place points (including the temporary ones generated by the search function). In the next figure, the system has automatically generated driving directions from Stockbridge, MA. It automatically calculates the distance and driving time.
As you can see in the figure, directions are printed on the image next to the turns, and stay there even as you zoom in and out (until you clear them). There’s also one-click integration with Google Maps, so you can print nice road maps of your route, and get the directions in a form that’s easy to read and bring into the car with you.
Besides the lack of indexing for stream features, the only other major drawback with Google Earth for our purposes is the lack of high resolution images in some states. Massachusetts and New Jersey have the best coverage, with a resolution of better than a pixel/foot. You can track even the smallest streams.
In New York and Pennsylvania, the resolution is more like a pixel/meter in most areas of interest to fishermen, which makes it nearly useless for viewing small wild trout streams.
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