A simple mapping and GIS shareware package

(click on thumbnails to see full-size images)

Satellite rocket re-entry
The first figure shows the ground trace of a booster rocket after a malfunction that resulted in thrust no longer being produced. The ground trace is annotated with altitudes at major events (shutdown, payload fairing jettison, apogee (highest altitude), final telemetry from booster, and dispersed values of the propellant explosion (due to atmospheric heating)). The oval is the nominal impact area for the payload fairing and second stage debris while the rectangle is the calculated impact area for satellite debris caused by this failure.
The second figure shows the aerial search that was done to locate debris from the failure. Different colored paths correspond to different sorties. Helicopter icons show where the search crew landed and searched by foot. The rectangle and oval are the same as in the previous map.
The third figure shows dots that indicate the possible impact points of a fuel tank from the fractured satellite. The dispersions on the impact locations account for things like unknown winds, perturbations to the orientation and magnitude of the fuel explosion on the booster rocket, and drag values for the satellite fuel tanks. The red dots correspond to a fuel tank without any propellant in it. The blue dots are for a tank fully loaded with propellant. For commercial reasons, the data shown are based on real data, but details including the geographic location have been changed (this example did not occur in British Columbia).

Endemic bird areas
The map is a depiction of an Endemic Bird Area (as defined by BirdLife International), no. 162 -- Northern Nusa Tenggara. There are some 50 Endemic Bird Areas in the Malay Archipelago from the Nicobar Islands in the west to the Solomon Islands in the east. The base map was created in AGIS, then a metafile image was copied to the clipboard and further processed using Corel Draw.
(Ong Hua Siong)

Charter flight logging
This Canadian-based charter flight company uses AGIS to create long distance flight logs as images for HTML documents on an intranet server. Using the image mapping features of HTML, the pages are linked to provide a zoom facility using stored photographs taken of different areas in the flight. The small pictures are linked to the full size versions and the stars on the track show where the pictures were taken. The stars are also active links to the large version of the picture taken at that spot. The intranet pages are used for historical record keeping, and also as a source for digital records of the flight given to charter passengers on CD. Flight tracks are taken from the aircraft track log GPS and plotted as an AGIS data file. A large number of aviation symbols have been created by adding to the agis.sym file. (Robert Pask)

Weekend 4 wheel driving
Whenever we go somewhere new we take a Garmin GPS12 handheld GPS as well as a printout of the roads we have already followed in an area. When we get home, it is a simple job to download the latest track (shown as black lines) and any waypoints (yellow and red circles) to the PC for display and printing out. The background map from the AGIS Map of the World provides reasonable position details for some roads that don't even appear on standard road maps. Also, it is easy to use AGIS mark the position of intended routes or waypoints that can then be entered or uploaded to the handheld GPS.

Medical patient tracking
An eastern US medical organisation uses AGIS to map and report on the geographic origin of the patients at each of its local centers. A null-filled circle symbol set so that the size is relative to the map display is used to show radial distances from each center. Patient locations are taken from a database using the zip code for geo-location and written to an AGIS data file. Regular reporting in this way is fully automated.

Weekend sailing
A keen sailor in Austria uses AGIS to plot sailing routes taken on the local lakes. He has added his own nautical symbols by editing the agis.sym file, and translates his GPS track log to an AGIS data file using Excel. (Gerald Winkler)

Water quality
University study of water chemistry in the region of New York (P. Lee Ferguson)

Trawl grounds in shelf waters of south east Australia in the 1920s and 1930s
Since the beginning of the trawl fishery in 1915, trawl grounds were discovered in most areas of the shelf from Newcastle in the north to Tasmania in the south. Fishing tended to move into deeper waters and further south as catch rates in more accessible areas declined. Up to 17 steam trawlers fished the shelf areas in this early period of the fishery, and catch rates were often comparable to the well-known trawl fisheries in the Northern Hemisphere such as the North Sea. The map shows area divisions chosen for spatial aggregations used in this study.
Klaer, N.L. 2001. Steam trawl catches from south eastern Australia from 1918 to 1957: trends in catch rates and species composition. Marine and Freshwater Research, 52:399-410.

Quill-worm distribution in New Zealand
Distribution of Proserpinaster neozelanicus (triangles) and of Hyalinoecia spp. (squares) in central New Zealand seas in relation to the 200 and 1000 metre isobaths. Solid triangles are NIWA stations where both sea-stars and quill-worms were taken in the catch. Quill-worm records outside the latitudinal range of the sea-star records are not shown.
Read, G. B., & H. E. S. Clark. 1999. Ingestion of quill-worms by the astropectinid sea-star Proserpinaster neozelanicus (Mortensen). New Zealand Journal of Zoology, 26:49-54.

Seabird by-catch mitigation
Position of observed Japanese longline sets from 1 April 1992 to 31 March 1995.
Klaer, N., & Polacheck, T. 1998. The influence of environmental factors and mitigation measures on by-catch rates of seabirds by Japanese longline fishing vessels in the Australian region. Emu 98:305-316.

Seabird by-catch
Positions of capture of seabirds retained by observers for identification from 1 April 1992 to 31 March 1995.
Klaer, N., & Polacheck, T. 1997. By-catch of albatrosses and other seabirds by Japanese longline fishing vessels in the Australian Fishing Zone from April 1992 to March 1995. Emu 97:150-167.

Wandering Albatross tracking
Positions of Wandering Albatrosses tracked by attaching electronic archival tags to their legs while nesting at South Georgia and the Crozet Islands.
Tuck, G.N., Polacheck, T., Croxall, J.P., Weimerskirch, H., Prince, P.A. and Wotherspoon, S. 1999. The potential of archival tags to provide long-term movement and behaviour data for seabirds: first results from Wandering Albatross Diomedea exulans of South Georgia and the Crozet Islands. Emu 99:60-68.