Mapping programs

[Consaul, Laurie]

6 June 1995

I sent a version of this message to Roy Rich directly, but decided to
elaborate to the general list as well, as I appreciated hearing experiences
of other colleagues with their particular GIS software.  I apologize to
those who may choose to ignore this "advertisement".

At the National Herbarium of Canada we evaluated several mapping programs
including Spans and Mapinfo (for OUR needs) and settled on the program
QUIKmap to handle our mapping.  The mapping software can be purchased with a
map of North America or the world.  A database (dBase III, III plus or IV)
of specimen records for which the locality coordinates have been entered in
the specially named fields using Lat/Long or UTM formats can be mapped
automatically in a variety of symbols.  Several  projections can be chosen,
map layers can be added or removed, and datapoints can be added or removed
interactively while in mapping mode.  A paper describing this program more
fully can be found in:  Haber, E. 1993.  Desktop computer mapping at the
National Herbarium of Canada.  Taxon: 42: 63-70.   You may also find maps
generated by QUIKmap in: Aiken, S.G. and L.P. Lefkovitch. 1993.  On the
separation of two species.....Taxon 42: 323-337.  The maps in these
publications were laser printed directly from QUIKmap to a Laserjet III
printer.

I also find it useful to save the maps as .pcx files (in colour), for use as
graphics (in .gif format) in DELTA databases.

As with Atlas GIS and MapInfo, the DOS version can digitize, while the new
Windows version cannot, yet.
 --------------------------------------
Laurie Consaul
National Herbarium of Canada
Canadian Museum of Nature
lconsaul at mus-nature.ca