Big Thicket National Preserve overlaid on a Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus image from January 2, 2003. Image by HARC. |
The Big Thicket National Preserve in the National Park system consists of nine land units and six water corridors encompassing more than 97,000 acres. Big Thicket was the first Preserve in the National Park system and protects an area of rich biodiversity. The Natural Resources Department of the Big Thicket National Preserve has a wealth of biological data. Most of the data have geographic identifiers but are decentralized or are not in their correct geographic projection. CSWGCIN staff worked with the Big Thicket to 1) gather the various data sets describing the preserve and 2) organize the data into a logical structure, filling data gaps where applicable.
Big Thicket National Preserve's data collection includes imagery such as digital orthophoto quarter-quadrangles (DOQQ's), digital raster graphics (DRG's), shapefiles for a variety of objects such as roads, boundaries, facilities, vegetation types, streams and so forth. These data were collected, organized and projected to a common horizontal coordinate system (UTM15).
Bigsandy/Menard Creek unit overlaid on a DOQQ. Image by HARC. |
Census data were obtained from the United States Census Bureau. Population estimate data (for January 1, 2005) were included in the "Population, Race, Age, and Gender layer." The 2005 population estimate data were obtained from the Texas State Data Center (Office of the State Demographer) and are only available at the State, County, metropolitan statistical area (MSA), and Place geographic levels. Population projection data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Texas State Data Center will be incorporated in the near future.
Data were available at the following geographic levels:
- State - 1 state (Texas)
- County - 254 counties
- Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) - 24 MSAs
- Place - 1,510 places (cities, towns, villages)
- Zip Code (5-didget) - 1,744 Zip Codes
- Census Tract - 4,388 Tracts
- Census Block Group - 14,462 Block Groups
- Census Block - 664,970 Blocks
The Summary File 1 (SF1) Census file is 100% count data, not sample based data. SF1 contains 286 detailed tables focusing on age, sex, households, families, and housing units.
Bigsandy/Menard Creek unit overlaid on a DRG. Image by HARC. |
Imagery data include one Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) scene. The ETM+ is a multispectral scanning radiometer that is carried on board the Landsat 7 satellite.
