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	Flood Control District Wins Top Honors at GIS Day Map Competition > Learn about Geographic Information Systems (GIS) November 20, 2006 On November 16th and 17th, the Harris County Flood Control District's GIS Department participated in the Geographic Data Committee's annual GIS Day event held at the University of Houston-Downtown. The District has participated in this event since its inception in 1999. A major part of the event consists of the GIS Day Map Gallery. The District takes great pride in the quality of maps and exhibits produced for internal and public use, and each year, enters new maps in the competition with the hopes of being selected among the best. There are different categories for Government Agencies, Educational Institutions, Private Companies and Mentor Students. A "Best Overall" award is also given to the best map in the competition. This year, the District's GIS section coordinator, Mike Walters, won First Place in the Government category and Best Overall in the gallery. A description of the winning map and the other District submittals is below: > View or download large file (JPG, 3.0MB, 11/20/06) Principal Active Faults in Harris County, Texas Best in Government Best Overall The purpose of this exhibit is to make the population of Harris County aware of the geologic formations or active fault lines that are present in the area. It will enable potential homeowners, real estate developers, business owners, state and local governmental agencies, educational and health institutions and others to determine the presence of fault lines in a general area and to subsequently determine suitable places to locate their infrastructure. It will provide an overview of the area, the location of principal active fault lines and give insight to whether further investigation for development is needed. The map includes facts about the extent of previous investigations, discovery and characteristics of the fault lines present in the area. It also contains photographic examples of the damage to infrastructure caused by certain fault lines. Included on the map is an aerial photograph with a Land Use overlay that depicts the types of infrastructure affected by a specific fault line, the Long Point Fault. This image shows the fault traversing across and through residential and commercial properties, major roadways, freeways and drainage networks such as streams and bayous. Also included on the map is a LiDAR-derived digital elevation model (DEM) that illustrates how this data can be used to enhance the precision of mapping these fault locations. The land surface elevation data contained in the DEM can be color coded to display the presence of a fault line therefore enabling the digital mapping of the fault location. Data contained on this map was collected from previous reports and field investigations performed by the USGS, the USDA and the Association of Engineering Geologists, among others. > View or download large file (JPG, 3.3MB, 11/20/06) Harris County Flood Control District Custom Map Book Series This exhibit is an illustration of the custom map book series created by the Harris County Flood Control District's GIS Department. The Map Books created include a printed and bound Standard Edition at 1"=1500' (8 �"x11") for all employees' office use and an Aerial Photography Edition at 1"=1000' (11"x17") for departmental library use. A digital version of each edition, as well as an additional version containing comprehensive floodplain information, has been developed and, through a custom, browser-based application, is available via the Internet to all employees of Harris County. The exhibit displays four pages from each of the versions of the Map Book. The four page sections of the Floodplain, Standard, and Aerial editions intersect with each other to form a continuous series of map book pages along White Oak Bayou. The Flood Control District's GIS Section utilized the ESRI developer sample tool, DSMapBook, to create a Standard Edition map book containing 521 pages and covering all of Harris County, Texas. The Aerial Edition covers the same area, includes 1' resolution color imagery and contains 1,040 pages. The books cover over 1750 square miles and contains detailed hydrographical, jurisdictional, transportation, cultural, right-of-way and parcel information for the 4th largest city in the United States: Houston, Texas. > View or download large file (JPG, 2.1MB, 11/20/06) Sesquicentennial Park: 1944 - 2006 This exhibit depicts the history of the development and changes that have occurred in the Sesquicentennial Park area over the last 62 years. Each improvement or change is numbered, described and shown on the map. The majority of these changes or improvements have occurred over the last 20 years. The improvements have been a direct result of the Buffalo Bayou Partnership's effort to enhance the appeal of the area by creating Sesquicentennial Park and adding other public amenities at various locations along Buffalo Bayou. The map contains historical aerial imagery from 1944 through 2006, a development plan for the layout of the park and a landscaping plan depicting the placement of the many trees, shrubs and plants in the park.