Computer Aided Grassland Cartography with ArcMap Software

The whole process of the computer aided cartography of the grassland thematic maps using the ArcMap software, which is a part of the ArcGIS8 1, was introduced in detail in this article, and the particular problems that had been met during the work were illustrated carefully The grass data all over the country was got from the interpretation of Landsat TM remote sensing images that had beenph otographed during 1999~2000 The background factors being included in this grassland thematic map cartographic work are residents, administrative boundaries, road system, railway system and fluvial system. And all these background factors have the data sets with spatial resolution of 1∶500 000 Both the grassland data sets and the geographical base maps were made by the ARC/INFO software and were stored as ARC/INFO coverage format files Based on these data sets, the cartographic work was divided into two parts The first part was the cartography of grassland based on all the provincial administrative units except Taiwan province, Hong Kong special municipality and Macao special municipality because of the unavailability of their grassland data sets An atlas including 31 maps in total was got at the end of the work The second part was the cartography of grassland based on the 1∶500 000 scale spatial division of the whole country An atlas including more than 210 maps covering the whole terrestrial section as well as the section of large islands was got at last The first part of the work was much complicated than the other and more flexibility was needed However the second part of the work had a much heavier workload than the first one In view of these obvious differences between the two parts of the work, different workflows were designed respectively to efficiently accomplish them In addition, the computer hardware system and the software environment, especially the ArcMap software needed by the cartographic work were introduced and discussed in detail in this article