Maps featured in Climbing Magazine

Maps featured in the most current edition of Climbing Magazine -

We all have a gut feel about which places are the best to live for climbing. However, I wanted to see how things would look if livability based upon climbing was put on a map. The result are the three maps below. The first map only factors in crags within 100 kilometers, the second 200 kilometers, and the third 400 kilometers. For more information about the methods see the poster in my July posting. You can also save the images by clicking on them to enlarge them and then right clicking and selecting save.

Photo on the College of Science Website

Poster contest photo featured on the College of Science Website -

Tim Weigel and I recently were featured on the University of Nevada Reno College of Science website along with the other winners of the student poster contest. Our poster took third place. The poster was entitled "A weights-of-evidence approach to mapping avalanche terrain in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, USA", and was a class project that we had done in the fall semester. That is Tim in the white shirt. I'm in the blue shirt on the far right side.

http://www.unr.edu/cos/Main-Events.html

In other news I'll be traveling to Elko, Nevada next week for a mine closure and reclamation workshop. I'm planning on giving a talk entitled "Geographic information systems, landscape ecology, and geomorphometry: what they are and what they can do for mine reclamation".

Work soon to be featured in Climbing Magazine

Defining livability based upon proximity to climbing crags -

This winter I undertook a project to determine which portions of the country are the best for climbers. After contacting Climbing Magazine, editor Matt Samet agreed to write a piece about my research. Look for my maps and an interview in the Off the Wall column of the August edition. I scanned, georeferenced, and digitized maps from Rock N' Road, a climbing atlas authored by Tim Toula. Then I analyzed the data in a GIS to produce a map of livability based upon the number of crags in the vicinity. Hopefully, the maps will provide people with a graphical representation of climbing potential in certain areas of the lower-forty eight states. At this time I feel that Alaska, Canada, Mexico, and maybe Hawaii haven't been as thoroughly explored as the forty-eight contiguous states, and that it wouldn't be fair to compare them. Sort of like apples and oranges. Below is a poster that I put together and presented at the Nevada GIS Conference in South Lake Tahoe.