MSU Map Library: Links to Useful Sites: Geo Tools

I always thought there were 2 acres per hectare, but no. It is 2.471 acres per hectare. Convert further to square yards, meters, feet, and 50 other units of several nationalities.

This utility permits the user to convert latitude and longitude between decimal degrees and degrees, minutes, and seconds

I like this site because it allows for a lot of odd units of English measure, like league, furlong, and link, but also numerous international measures like the Japanese shyaku, Chinese chi, Thai sawk, ancient Roman ped ordinary, need I go on?

If you know a Public Land Survey System Township, Range, and Section, you can convert it to a latitude/longitude location.

GeoWebFace is an interactive map intending to show oil & gas, mining & minerals, and geology information. But it also displays the PLSS down to the section number. Thanks, guys!

I looked all over for an app that would do this, and here it is in an unlikely place. This is for when you are given a legal land description and need to know where in the US it is, or the other way around.

Draw a polygon on a map, retrieve the size of the area in miles, kilometers, acres, meters and feet.

This website is actually an interactive tool for retrieving crop data. But one of the tools on the toolbar allows you to draw a quadrangle, circle, or rectangle and retrieve areal statistics including total acreage contained within the shape. Including how many acres within the shape are open water.

This is "as the crow flies"

This extensive list of world (usually geopolitical) changes will help with dating maps that have no publication date on them.

The US Geodetic Survey defines, maintains and provides access to the National Spatial Reference System. The Framework contains the foundational elements of latitude, longitude, elevation, shoreline information and their changes over time.

Will take you on a visual tour of numerous mathematical map projections.

The European Petroleum Survey Group maintains a registry of map projections. The EPSG number for a projection has become useful in specifying a coordinate system in GIS software.

Geocode addresses. Make a Google map with the addresses, or export latitude/longitude coordinates for export to a GIS.

Free licensing tool can be obtained by academic institutions through Safe Software. FME can convert between a tremendous range of data formats and is very helpful for CAD, GIS, KML and imagery conversions.

Zonums Software offers several utilities including: Epoint2GE: Excel to Google Earth; Kml2shp 2: Google Earth to GIS; DigiPoint 2: Points export from Google Maps; Shp2kml 2: Shapefile to Google Earth; Epoint2CAD: Excel to AutoCAD; Ucons: Units Conversion Tool; Color-it: Color your Map; KMLTolbox: KML online tools

Quantum GIS is an open source GIS software and an official project of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo). It runs on Linux, Unix, Mac OSX, and Windows.

Offers geocoding, adress parsing, standardization, and more for up to 2500 requests per upload. Users must create an account and attribute the source of their data to use this service without payment.

Translate on-the-fly or entire documents between any of 64 languages. Will detect (guess) languages. Latin is now supported! Which is great for those of us with old maps.

Thank goodness Wikipedia pulled together this detailed-yet-concise information about all the varying systems for measuring paper. "Full sized" maps cranked off a plotter from a GIS or CAD file will often be "ANSI E" size, 34" x 44" by printing sideways on 36" paper.

Map of the USA where you can specify a point and a radius to search within and return all the ZIP codes found inside that radius.