[Coral-List] Habitat Digitizer Extension available for ArcGIS 9

[chris jeffrey]

Hi Coral Listers,

The Habitat Digitizer Extension is now available for use in ESRI's 
ArcGIS 9 software. The extension is designed to use a hierarchical 
classification scheme to delineate habitats by visually interpreting 
georeferenced images such as aerial photographs, satellite images, and 
side scan sonar. It allows users to create custom classification schemes 
and rapidly delineate and attribute polygons, lines, and points using 
simple menus. The extension allows new hierarchical classification 
schemes to be easily created, modified, and saved for use on future 
mapping projects.

The extension started as an ArcView 3 project in 1999. It was written to 
assist a contractor with minimal ArcView skills to digitize benthic 
habitat maps of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands (see 
http://ccma.nos.noaa.gov/ecosystems/coralreef/usvi_pr_mapping.html ), 
using a hard-coded classification scheme for that specific project. To 
make the digitizer more useful in other mapping applications, it was 
developed as an ArcView extension with the ability to import a user 
defined classification scheme. Since being made publicly available in 
2001, the extension has been downloaded over 2500 times and is being 
used in many different marine and terrestrial applications.

The new version of the extension for ArcGIS 9 makes the tool set 
available to the growing number of users working on the latest version 
of ESRI's mapping software. It contains all of the capabilities of the 
old version with additional tools to perform attribution error checking 
and to test shapefile compatibility. It is publicly available on ESRI's 
ArcScripts page at http://arcscripts.esri.com/details.asp?dbid=14603

For more information, contact Ken.Buja at noaa.gov

-- 
********************************************************
Christopher F.G. Jeffrey, Ph.D.

Coral Reef Ecologist 
NOAA/NOS/NCCOS/CCMA/Biogeography Program
301.713.3028 x-134 (Tel)
301.713.4384 (Fax)
http://biogeo.nos.noaa.gov/projects/reef_fish/

Mailing Address:
National Ocean Service
1305 East-West Hwy, SSMC-4, N/SCI-1, #9213
Silver Spring, MD 20910-3281
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