All of the data on this website - plus much more of use to seekers of wild trout - is freely available for download over the Internet.

Virtually all of the map data is available in the de facto professional standard called a "shape" file.  Increasingly, this data is available in KML format as well, which can be read by Google Earth (and its compressed - zipped - brother, KMZ).  We've tried to locate some of the most important data files in whatever format, and within the limits of our energy and tools, converted the most important ones to a  Google Earth-compatible format.

Inevitably, however, there's a lot more data which we'll never get to, which you might find useful.  It might be a detailed town map published by a municipal agency; it might be a park map which shows a trail system that goes near your streams.  It could be anything: hundreds of organizations, including most universities, are creating GIS data every day and making them available for free.  It's one of the last bastions of academic freedom/professional courtesy left in the world.

The question is whether you want to take it on.  The open source world has made full-functioned GIS software available, for free, to anyone who bothers to download it (which is easy) and learn how to use it (which is pretty dam*d hard).

Data Sources

Sources for GIS data include the US Federal Government.  You can use the National Map to specify an extent, and then download from hundreds of different databases including the NHD database. Virtually every college and university (from community college on up), every state government, and every medium-sized or larger city has a GIS department.  MOST post the results of their work on the Internet as "shapefiles", which can be freely downloaded by anyone who cares to find them.

There's simply much more data available in shape files than there is for web viewers or tools like Google Earth.  You just need to download the data, and view them using GIS software on your computer.

Do a Google Search on "[Subject] GIS data download", substituting the topic of your choice for [Subject]. I think you might be shocked by the depth and breadth of what's out there.

Free GIS Workstation Software

Free GIS Workstation Software? That didn't exist in 2006.  You had to buy it from a commercial vendor, and it was very expensive. For example, the simplest, entry-point commercial GIS workstation software from ESRI still costs $1,500/seat, and high-end systems are several times that.

All you could get for free at the time was a viewer called ArcExplorer which we used to create many of the maps on this website.  At that time it was nearly obsolete, but it did do an OK job of displaying shapefiles, once you worked around its quirks.  The old ArcExplorer was replaced a couple of years ago by a completely new tool with the same name. The new one is much slicker and easier to use, and it's web savvy, but in the new world we're not just trying to create maps, we're trying to save datasets that others can use.  

However, two newish tools are available via the open source movement that make this feasible.  These are fully functioning GIS workstations.  In the new environment, you can take a dataset, run queries on it, and then actually save the result in a new shape file.  If you know what you're doing, you can also link new datasets to existing shape files, or even create new data from scratch.  In the old days those were capabilities you had to pay a lot of money to get.  Today, if you use an open source tool, they're free.

We managed to make some progress using two different open source tools.

• MapWindow is a windows-only tool available from mapwindow.org.  It is targeted at the non-professional user, and is relatively easy to use.  I was able to download it, open up some of the project directories I'd saved from my old ArcExplorer projects, and display usable maps within an hour or so.  It took me a few hours more to figure out how to query datasets and save the results in a new shape file.  For most users, if you're on a Windows box, this probably the way to go.  It's still a bit quirky and buggy, but it's being actively supported and there's a community of users that can help you.  BTW, the so called "Beta releases" are generally less buggy and more reliable than the so-called "full releases", which tend to be old.  Do a search on the site to find them.
• Grass GIS is an open source project that develops and distributes for free a full-function GIS workstation targeted at academic and professional users, that competes with ESRI, and which runs on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS-X.  This is incredibly powerful software, but that's also the bad news: for the non-GIS specialist, it's a daunting system to learn and use, made more difficult by the fact that development of GRASS seems to be centered in Italy and the English documentation and tutorials leave a lot to be desired.  Click on the link for the GRASS download page.  If you explore the site where you download, you'll find tutorials and other documentation that can get you started.  I gave up on my first go round with GRASS, then circled back a couple of weeks later and have managed get some useful output from it.

Now having used both tools fairly intensively (for the limited functions that I know how to do) I would recommend starting with MapWindow unless you absolutely don't have access to a Windows box, or unless you expect this to be a tool you're going to spend a lifetime learning and using professionally.  MapWindow is just a lot easier and more straight forward.  Grass seems to have a lot more functionality, but it's basically an unvarnished, old-fashioned UNIX app.  Both seem to have more functionality than I'll ever use.  Even though I'm basically a Mac user, I installed BootCamp on my MacBook Pro so I could run MapWindow, and I'm very pleased I did.

Export as KML Files

The pro version of Google Earth, which costs $399/year, will read shape files and save KMLs.  For those of us who don't have a license to GE Pro (and I certainly don't) you then have the issue of how to export the data.  There are a few solutions available.

For $29 you can pick up Shape2Earth and use it with MapWindows.  It's a great little tool, and if you plan on exporting a bunch of these things, well worth the money.  It gives you a great deal of control on how your KML will look, and does a nice job of rendering your data.

If you don't want to spend the money, the best free tool I found (and part of the fun of this website is to see how far I can go using free tools), is using a website called GeoCommons.  You can upload a shape file (unfortunately limited to a maximum of 10 MB).  Once it's up, GeoCommons processes your file (basically converts the local projection of your file to the standard projection used by GE), and lets you download the result.  There may be other "free" resources out there, but I've been pretty happy with GeoCommons. 

If you'd be interested in my creating a tutorial on how to do this stuff, please comment on this site or send me a message.  I'm not going to do it unless I hear there's strong interest.