Chuck Sutherland

I'm always looking for a way to create a better basemap for my cartographic work. One of my favorite tools is the bare Earth model created by stripping canopy data from LiDAR. Sometimes having tree canopy data is useful for cartographic purposes, so here's a quick tutorial on how I've extracted and symbolized that data for use in ArcMap. Our goal is to end up with a map that looks like this. I have used a hillshade generated from LiDAR and have it set to 50% transparent and the canopy layer is underneath with a color ramp of leaf green for high, apple green for medium, and yucca yellow for low (none). I've added elevation contours, and a water layer created using this tutorial . To get to this map, you'll need to have two elevation layers rendered from LiDAR. I'm working with data that can be found here . Feel free to download White_2015_16_zLAS.zip and work alongside me. Once you've got all of your zLAS files in a LAS Dataset , add it to the table ...

It's always cool when my photos get used somewhere. Bartoo Hall on campus at Tennessee Tech is the latest place to take advantage of my regional photos. Below are lots of photos of the images they used with some dork posing beside them. ;)  

Hypsometric Shading Hypsometric Shading is a method that I have been using to generate beautiful basemaps well before I knew what it was called. Sometime during my undergraduate days I had the idea to view a hillshade at 50% transparency and lay it atop a color-ramp-ed elevation layer. The resulting output was already well known to cartographers, and appears to have been first done in 1503 by one of my very favorite historic figures,  Leonardo da Vinci . While I am no Leonardo, I offer these examples of my previous work as a means to better understand what hypsometric shading looks like. Topographic Position Index (TPI) While hypsometric shading is generally pleasing one may need to draw the users attention to other types of features. By using a combination of a hillshade at 50% and a Topographic Position Index (TPI) raster, one could draw attention to ridges and valleys. For example, I offer this map of an area within Scotts Gulf in White County. The TPI lay...

Last year I purchased a handheld longwave light in the hopes that it would assist in non-destructive mineral identification in caves. The model I purchased was Convoy S2+ Nichia 365nm UV LED 1Mode OP Reflector Flashlight since it ran on 18650 rechargeable batteries and seemed of rugged construction. After having been caving with it for more than a year I've found it to be rugged enough for my typical caving trip, though I generally carry it in a pelican case with my camera. It is lightweight, and doesn't seem to drain the battery quickly, though I use it only for a handful of minutes on any given caving trip. To no one's surprise calcite is the dominant mineral in the caves of Middle Tennessee that I frequent. Trace impurities within calcite which can color it dramatically in visible light do not significantly change the phosphorescent color spectra. Other minerals present in caves of Middle Tennessee include chert (which does not phosphoress), dolomite (which reflects ...

What is the biggest building in Tennessee? Obviously, this blog post will be dated at some point, likely in the not-so-far future. But I have at my disposal, after several hours of processing a huge geojson of data, courtesy of Microsoft, the building footprints for Tennessee in an easily digestible GIS format. It turns out the GM Spring Hill Plant is the largest building, weighing in at approximately 5,942,799 square feet. Or, in other words,  0.21 square miles.

I am surfing on the receding limb of a media wave that swept around the globe, gradually slowing. In this story I am not the protagonist or the antagonist, but simply someone near. As such, the knowledge that comes from perspective may be useful to someone now, or in the future, or perhaps never at all. This story will find its way to the surface likely long after the media cycle and the world has forgotten about little Jackson County, Tennessee. This story is for cavers, and for the locals who call the Upper Cumberland home. This story is for you. This story is disconnected. It's disconnected from direct involvement with any of the exploration, and disconnected from the rescue. But these are events that originated from a disconnect, a moment where the dive line which held the diver's life separated. As you know, all things are connected, and so in this story I will attempt to connect all the lose bits. On November 12th, 2016 my friend showed me a beautiful spring in her b...

Ament resurgence is the name of Cookeville's largest natural storm water drain (also known as a cave). A resurgence is a spring, a place where water returns to the surface from the subsurface. Two springs can be found at this place. Pigeon Roost Spring, which sits somewhat higher in elevation above the Ament resurgence is only a short distance away and drains to the same location (in the video below, it's the waterfall coming from the left). From this place where they meet approximately 3800 acres are drained, all within the city of Cookeville. Many of the tributary streams begin above ground, go underground, resurface, and go underground again before coming out at this location. After a large rain on 2/20/2019 I visited the spring to find the spring like this. For comparison, here is another high water event that I recorded on 2/16/2018. Using GIS I was able to tease out the area which drains to this spot, or the watershed. Curious about how the land was used in that re...