CIR Imagery is good at penetrating atmospheric haze and for determining the health of vegetation; the pigment in plant leaves, chlorophyll, strongly absorbs visible light. The cell structure of the leaves, on the other hand, strongly reflects near-infrared light. Therefore, the stronger the light sensed by the camera, the healthier the plant is.
NYS GIS Clearinghouse posted 2020 aerials from Oswego, Lewis, Jefferson, St. Lawrence, Franklin, Clinton — Chemung and Steuben – Nassau and Suffolk today. They previously posted Monroe and GLOW counties.
https://orthos.its.ny.gov/ArcGIS/services/wms/Latest/MapServer/WMSServer?
QGIS 3.18 introduces a host of enhancements and new features, along with a long-awaited feature - Native Point Cloud support in QGIS! Thanks to the efforts of Lutra, North Road, and Hobu, QGIS is now able to import and render point cloud data in various formats by leveraging the Open Source PDAL library. This functionality has been introduced due to the success of a crowd-funding campaign and would not have been possible without the support of the QGIS community and contributors. Thank you to all those involved in realizing this incredible milestone!
As QGIS Desktop 3.18 bids farewell to the DB2 database provider, it introduces support for users of the SAP HANA database system.
The Hillshade tool obtains the hypothetical illumination of a surface by determining illumination values for each cell in a raster. It does this by setting a position for a hypothetical light source and calculating the illumination values of each cell in relation to neighboring cells. It can greatly enhance the visualization of a surface for analysis or graphical display, especially when using transparency.
By default, shadow and light are shades of gray associated with integers from 0 to 255 (increasing from black to white).
Hillshading is a technique used to create a realistic view of terrain by creating a three-dimensional surface from a two-dimensional display of it. Hillshading creates a hypothetical illumination of a surface by setting a position for a light source and calculating an illumination value for each cell based on the cell's relative orientation to the light, or based on the slope and aspect of the cell.
Anyone can easily search for ArcGIS servers.
Assume you want to know if St. Louis County Minnesota (County seat is Duluth) has a public-facing ArcGIS server. First, find the county website. Note that the website address includes “stlouiscountymn”. Second, do a Google search on: stlouiscountymn “rest/services”. Include the quotes in your search.
If this county has a GIS server then you will likely see search hits to various places within the table of contents. Open any table of contents page and then in the upper left corner click on “Home”. You now will see the ‘top’ of the table of contents for this ArcGIS server and the browser address bar will display an address that ends in “/rest/services”.
Of course at the county and city level you could simply call or email the GIS staff and ask. Here is one way to phrase the question: “Do you have a public-facing ArcGIS server and, if so, what is the rest service endpoint?”
Sometimes you might see two server addresses that appear identical except one of them says “arcgis” and the other says “ArcGIS”. Technically these are different internet addresses and these two servers may or may not contain the same information.
Tip: If you are interested in a topic instead of a state/county/city then try a Google search like this example: “climate change” “rest/services”. Include keywords for your topic and always include rest/services in quotes. Many of the hits that are returned will point you to ArcGIS layers.
Some useful information from Joseph Elfelt’s amazing List of ARC GIS Servers.
Ersi Leaflet plugins for working with a handful of the most popular ArcGIS Service types. This includes Esri basemaps and feature services, as well as tiled map, dynamic map and image services.