
Art Meets Cartography: The 15,000-Year History of a River in Oregon - prismatic
http://www.oregonlive.com/travel/index.ssf/2013/04/willamette_river_presents_stun.html
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caipre

        > Lidar data is collected by low-, slow-flying aircraft with equipment
        > that shoots millions of laser points to the ground. ... It is
        > possible to strip buildings and vegetation from the images, so that
        > only the ground is shown. In the Willamette River poster, the shades
        > of white and blue show elevations. The purest white color is the
        > baseline, (the zero point, at the lowest point near Independence on
        > the upper part of the image). The darkest blue is 50 feet (or higher)
        > than the baseline.
    

Very cool, and really a beautiful image. Contour lines on a topographic map
show the same data, but mapping the elevation to a color range and clipping
out elevations outside the river's effects really make this unlike anything
I've seen before.

Edit: The original submission (see dang's post) references a similar set of
maps[0] for the Mississippi River, which are equally beautiful and even more
impressive.

[0]:
[http://www.radicalcartography.net/index.html?fisk](http://www.radicalcartography.net/index.html?fisk)

~~~
NelsonMinar
Here's another view I made of the Fisk map a few years ago. It's Google Maps
style. [http://somebits.com/fiskmap](http://somebits.com/fiskmap)

This LIDAR map of the Willamette is really beautiful. Electric blue is an odd
color for a data visualization, but it sure is striking.

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davidw
This is the area in question now:

[https://www.google.com/maps/@44.7288642,-123.1041719,11z/dat...](https://www.google.com/maps/@44.7288642,-123.1041719,11z/data=!5m1!1e4)

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dang
Url changed from [http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2015/11/willamette-river-
histo...](http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2015/11/willamette-river-history-dan-
coe/), which points to this.

