Digital Atlas of Texas Counties

The Digital Atlas of Texas Counties was developed as an information resource for each of the 254 counties in the state of Texas. The intent of the project was to develop the infrastructure necessary to support the production of county maps and Internet map services. Although many of the larger urban counties in Texas produce a variety of digital map products, most of the state is composed of rural counties with limited access to necessary hardware, software, funding, and technical expertise. To address this problem, the Digital Atlas of Texas Counties was developed to provide maps and an Internet map service for each county in the state.

There are three versions of the atlas. The county basemap series is a set of reference maps created using the vector base layers for each county. The shaded relief map series adds a digital elevation model and hillshade to highlight topography. The satellite relief map series uses Landsat TM imagery to provide an overview of land use. Each map series contains 254 county maps produced in a 17-by-24-inch format, and all maps are available for download as JPEGs and PDFs.

In addition to the three map series, the Digital Atlas of Texas Counties contains 254 map services. Using this approach, rural counties in the state can link to a personalized map service. The map services use a custom ArcIMS interface and standardized symbology and labeling.

All the atlas products are based on data available in the public domain; largely TIGER data from the U.S. Census Bureau, elevation data from the U.S. Geological Survey, and satellite imagery from TexasView. The map services and county map documents use ArcSDE to access the geospatial data stored in a Microsoft SQL database.