Monday, April 28. 2008

USDA Hardiness Zone Map - Coming Soon

Living on Earth (NPR radio show) asked the question of why it's been 18 since the last one.

GELLERMAN: So why hasn't the United States Department of Agriculture released a new hardiness zone map in almost 20 years? I put the question to the USDA's Kim Kaplan.

KAPLAN: Well there's actually been no set interval between any two editions of the USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map. One of the things that drove this one, frankly, is that the government printing office called and told us they were out of the old one, and should they print the same one again or were we going to do a new one. Because the old one was done in 1990 and predates the internet, it was not digital, and we knew we wanted to go to something that was state-of-the-art – something GPS, GIS compatible, much more detailed and much more sophisticated and most importantly web-friendly.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg at 06:00 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0) |

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Did you ask if they will put it up behind OGC Web Map
Service and Web Feature Service interfaces so everybody can use it without having to buy a specific software package?

#1 Sam on 2008-04-29 09:28 (Reply)

Ummm...why? There are plenty of free data viewers, for those who want to view or use the actual data. Download the data from a central location and off to the races.

If someone doesn't want the actual data. Put download links for .tiff or .pdf maps.

A WMS or WFS provided by the govt isn't necessary, would be nice, it's not a deal breaker.


KoS

#1.1 KoS on 2008-04-29 11:36 (Reply)

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