The Dallas Wetland Project

The Dallas Wetlands Project was a project for Dr. Margaret Brown, who required a quick way for students to process data in her labs for the University of Dallas Environmental Science class. The initial project was for a small inference engine which determined if a field location constitued a wetland or not. The conclusions were displayed using Gistix.

The inference engine encoded a subset of the Corps of Engineers Wetlands Delineation Manual (Technical Report Y-87-1), using Visual C++ and MFC. The resulting data was in a simple text format which could be imported into a spreadsheet, eg. Microsoft Excel. An GIS viewing tool based on the Gistix Toolkit was also supplied to view the resulting data on an aerial photograph. Online SVG maps were also created.

SVG Maps

SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is a W3C recommendation (ie. "web standard") for presenting vector graphics in web pages. Although it is sometimes dismissed as a "Flash killer", SVG is an open XML-based text format that has the potential for much more. Being XML-based, it can be created or transformed with XSLT (eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations). Being a vector format, SVG can be used to produce static images which are scalable (unlike bitmaps), or it can be combined with ECMAScript (standardised Javascript) to add interactivity and intelligence to an image. SVG is ideally suited to vector applications such as graph presentation, mapping, and CAD systems.

OpenLayers and MapServer were immature at the time of the Dallas Weltands project, and Microsoft Virtual Earth did not exist. Hence SVG was chosen to display the wetland data on the Internet.

The SVG implementation allowed a user to move around a map of the west side of the University of Dallas campus, viewing and selecting data sample points according to the students' findings. The SVG implementation has been taken offline, but the image to the right is a screenshot of what it looked like.

Virtual Earth Maps

The system was adapted in 2008 to use MySQL and Bing Maps. The logic was translated to PHP, as was the data editing functionality.

The results can be found on the BIO 2160 Environmental Science Wetland Assessment: Map of Field Data page at biomarcy.com.