Subject: Forty acres and a GIS?

From: [email-masked] (Hank Roberts)
Date: Sat, 27 Mar 1993 18:09:34 GMT

Crossposted between comp.infosystems.gis and alt.co-evolution.
I reviewed GIS tools for the Whole Earth Catalog a while back and
am hoping other ideas are circulating about using GIS for land
management.  I've seen some of what's being done with ArcInfo, and
am vaguely aware of the work they're doing with Ralph Nader who
addressed the ESRI folks a while back -- would welcome more info
in those areas.

My specific and personal example:  I've got 40 steep, fire-ravaged
acres on a hot dry-summer snowy-winter mountainside to restore.  It's
going okay, basically using the wonderful approach described by
Malcolm Margolin in his wonderful book _The_Earth_Manual [Heyday
books, Berkeley, currentlyi in print].

And I have these computers, topo maps, various photos including stereo
pairs of the site taken from my hang glider (yes, that's why I like
this mountain, it's a flying site).  And I'm wondering, hmmmmm -----
could I set up a GIS and turn my slow accumulation of paper notes and
memory of what's growing/eroding/snowpacked/etc into a proper GIS?