Peru RPCV Malcolm Moore plots out the latest mapping methods
Surveyor plots out the latest mapping methods
By MIKE KALIL
Reformer Staff
MARLBORO -- Computerized mapping technology will eventually phase out primitive methods and increase the efficiency of area services, a local land surveyor said Saturday.
"In my view, the future of mapping in the area is by" Geographic Information Systems, land surveyor Malcolm Moore told a group of about 10 at the Marlboro Historical Society on Saturday afternoon.
In a roughly 90-minute talk about the past, present and future of mapping in Marlboro and Windham County, Moore said mapping has never been perfect, and was never meant to be.
There's a land of errors in maps of the area, which is in part because the terrain is so difficult to measure, he said. Town lines were never precisely mapped out, but rather were eventually accepted.
But GIS can be especially helpful for providing services, such as public utilities, he said. GIS is able to store and retrieve data and relate it to land mass.
With the technology, a police department could track the occurences of car accidents on a particular road, and a fire department could do the same with blazes.
The incidents could be tracked in 10-year intervals, he said, which could prove helpful in preventing such things.
"You get some amazing patterns that will appear," he said.
Canada is way ahead of the United States with GIS, he said, but Vermont has made itself an innovator.
Moore is a Marlboro native who went on to attend the University of Washington in Seattle. He spent two years in Peru while serving in the Peace Corps.
But he's spent most of his life in Marlboro, a town of 1,080, where he has worked in land surveying. He's studied early maps of the area, and was amazed by how accurate some of them were given the limited technology they had.
Current maps of the area were made by aerial photographs. Mappers used orthoplates, which correct a photograph's dimensions, and simply traced.
"You think of photos as perfect, but they aren't," Moore said as he explained orthoplates.
Moore also explained early road layouts and mapping effects on property taxation.
