Spatial Measurements on USGS Topo Maps
Photo of a landscape featuring a white sand road disappearing into pine trees on the horizon. Sunbleached grass and a palm tree in the foreground, bright sun contrasts with dramatically dark sky and advancing storm clouds.
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Keywords

US Topo
UTM
Topographic map
Geographic Information System

How to Cite

Hochmair, Hartwig, and Adam Benjamin. 2021. “Spatial Measurements on USGS Topo Maps: FOR364/FR433, Februrary 2021”. EDIS 2021 (1). Gainesville, FL:7. https://doi.org/10.32473/edis-fr433-2021.

Abstract

United States Geological Survey topographic maps provide a variety of geospatial measurement tools thanks to their built-in georeferencing capabilities. Georeferencing facilitates display of geographic coordinates and measurement of distances, perimeters, and areas on PDFs using the measure tools built into Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat. This 7-page fact sheet written by Hartwig H. Hochmair and published by the UF/IFAS School of Forest Resources and Conservation explains and showcases the use of these geospatial readout functions. It also provides background information about and assistance with estimating point coordinates on the Universal Transverse Mercator grid cast on USGS topographic maps as an optional layer.

https://doi.org/10.32473/edis-fr433-2021
view on EDIS
PDF-2021

References

Campbell, J. 2001. Map Use & Analysis (4th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Knippers, R. 2009. Geometric Aspects of Mapping. http://kartoweb.itc.nl/geometrics/

van Sickle, J. 2015. GPS for Land Surveyors (4th Ed.). CRC Press. https://doi.org/10.1201/b18480

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.