March Madness - Google to Locate, CARES for Details.

01/20/2011 12:14 pm

Doug Brethower

Tags: hunting , property , google maps , real estate , CARES

March, Missouri, where in wide world of sports is that?

March, MO is a location near where I grew up, with some land for sale. It had some great hunting back in the day.

With all the great new technology, the power of the Web and the internet, what is the fastest way to research this property for hunting ground potential? The idea is to get the details, like surrounding terrain and vegetation, drainages, houses, without wasting time driving around and hiking.

The state of Missouri has a really neat program through the university extension that goes by the acronym of CARES, the Center for Applied Research and Environmental Systems. It provides map overlays based upon the area of research. The actual mapping site runs in the http://ims.missouri.edu domain.

The CARES site is used for many important and detailed studies of land and land use in Missouri. In this case, it is perfect for a quick yet thorough review of a parcel of land for hunting potential.

The drawback of cares-ims, is it takes forever to traverse into the location if you don't already know the gps coordinates. Relative to google maps, it is downright clunky for pinpointing a location.

Google maps does a fantastic job of pinpointing a location, but does not provide the detail information available through MO CARES.

Best of Both Worlds

How cool would it be to combine the best features of both for rapid access to topology info for hunting information? And how difficult is this to implement?

Answer? Judge for yourself the cool and difficulty factors.

Ideally, given a lat-lon coordinate for a target, a url could be built that would zoom straight into that location in MO CARES with the data layers pre-selected simply using parameters passed in with the url.

Unfortunately, the ideal is not possible in the latest configuration.

Here is the best I have been able to conjure so far, step by step:

Locate the target in Google Maps using the Safari web browser. http://maps.google.com
In this case, I know that March, MO is closest burg
Using the fast and simple google maps interface, zoom and pan until the center of the property in question is centered in the browser window. In this case on Candlewood road.
The trick, some javascript entered into the address bar of the Safari web browser
javascript:void(prompt('',gApplication.getMap().getCenter())); Cut and paste everything to the left into the browser address bar, where the http://.... normally appears.
Hit the enter key and GPS coordinates are returned quite precisely, in this case (37.50604915196867, -93.13762664794922)
Go to http://ims.missouri.edu/moims2008/step1AOI.aspx
Select the longitude-latitude link.
Input the lat-lon values to about 4 or 5 significant digits
Continue in the CARES interface to the "Select data layers" tab.
Continue to "Verify selections" tab.
Click the "Make Map" button.
Now zoom, pan, add and remove data layers to check out roads, drainages, trails, houses, topography, anything deemed important.

It becomes simple to get an idea of whether or not the property is worthy of further consideration. Should it be deemed worthy, with a little further examination, you can determine the best locations for game cams for final verification before writing the check.

January is the best month to begin prospecting for next years monster buck. Least vegetation, bucks still have antlers, barring incident, the animal will very likely be in that general area next fall.