For work I’ve been using a lot of freely available GIS data to plot on Google Earth and sometimes Maps (if the resulting file is small enough).

I have also helped out the Minnesota Cache Reviewer, Surfer Joe (along with some help from Paul Falstad) with plotting the Minnesota DNR’s AMA boundaries on Google Earth.

The DNR likes to put the coordinate system into something other than WGS84, so you have to use ogr2ogr like this: ogr2ogr -s_srs EPSG:32615 -t_srs WGS84 out.shp in.shp

After that, the out.shp will contain the coordinate system we are all so accustomed to :)

The first file I sent to him just included the polygon boundaries (very similar to the County boundaries in KML/KMZ I did before) but that was only useful in telling that it was or wasn’t in an AMA. It was very difficult to determine which AMA it was actually located in. The Minnesota DNR has a KMZ available of their Wildlife Management Areas (available here) which includes information points for each of the WMAs.

Using a script available as part of the ShapeLib tools, shpcentrd, I was able to determine the centroid of the polygon in the shape files and create a new shape file of points that could be converted with shp2kml.

If you would like to see the final product of the AMAs, please check here and for the Minnesota School Districts, click here.

Related posts:

1. Minnesota DNR Boundaries in KMZ
2. Minnesota County KMZ Overlay for Google Maps
3. GMap Pedometer and GMaptoGPX
4. Bill Roehl No Longer Points Directly to me on Google!
5. Out of Shape Swimming, Again: Eagan, MN