Here in Colorado at the ESRI Denver office, I have a favorite walking course that I take at lunchtime, which affords wonderful views of the Front Range mountains. I collected this course as a track using my GPS as an illustration of how easy it is to take field-collected positions and map them with a variety of GIS tools. Here, let’s use ArcGIS Explorer, a freely downloadable GIS that can easily stream data from the Internet or display it from the GIS data files on your local computers. In the field, I simply turned on my GPS receiver, a Garmin GPS 76S Map, and it automatically collected my track. Back in the office, I saved the track in the GPS receiver and used the Minnesota DNR’s free Garmin software ( http://www.dnr.state.mn.us/mis/gis/tools/arcview/extensions/DNRGarmin/DNRGarmin.html ) to transfer my track to the computer. I used the DNR tool to save my track as a point shapefile. I had 129 points in the file, and the attribute table associated with the shapefile had a latitude and longitude value for each point, as shown below.

I then added my track using “File” and then “Open” and I navigated to my locally stored shapefile. I changed the symbols to a 6-meter yellow pushpin, and then rotated and tilted my walkabout to view it from southeast to northwest, as follows:

I saved this document as an .nmf file so that I can return to it. The advantages of mapping in ArcGIS Explorer are that it is quick, that the base imagery automatically was added, and I could examine my route in 3-D. Your students could use the same procedures to map their route to your campus or between data points at their field study site.

What else could you do with these points once they are inside ArcGIS Explorer? You could hyperlink selected points to ground photographs or movies, to web addresses, to text files, or anything else that could be accessed on your computer. I will discuss these tasks in a future blog posting.

- Joseph Kerski, ESRI Education Manager