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Remote Sensing Customized Datasets

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Remote Sensing Home Page

The Web Coverage Service (WCS), Web Map Service (WMS) and Web Feature Service (WFS) are all supported by the Harvard Forest On-line ArcGIS Server. These additional resources allow the user to specify a bounding region, resolution and download format for retrieving data. Use of these services has the advantage of providing access to the remote sensing data through a uniform interface that is able to resample data and provide values on a common grid and in a common format. Users that wish to access the data in their native format are encouraged to go to the Quick Downloads and Sources of Remote Sensing Data web pages.

Web Coverage Service (WCS)
For those wanting to create their own digital data sets that can be used for quantitative analysis.   

Web Map Service (WMS)
For those wanting to create images that can be included in other websites and publications 

Web Feature Service (WFS)
For those wanting to extract vector features for the region (e.g. plot boundaries, etc.) 

Available WMS and WCS layers

Available WFS layers

IDL programs

Several programs written in IDL (Interactive Data Language), distributed by Exelis. The programs provided here can be used to query the WCS and WMS services of the On-line ArcGIS Server in order to convert remote sensing data layers into coregistered files in GeoTIFF format onto the user's hard drive. These GeoTIFF files can then be read by programs written in R, ENVI, IDL, Matlab, ArcGIS and other processing languages. 

get_hf_data.pro
An IDL function that interacts with the ArcGIS Server to download data shown there.

get_massgis_data.pro
An IDL function that interacts with the MassGIS webservices for querying and downloading data.

create_bounding_box.pro
An IDL function that takes a corner latitude/longitude and distances in meters, to create a bounding box that can be used with the get_hf_data and get_massgis_data programs.

make_hf_gisdata.pro
An IDL script that uses the above functions to create the data found on the Quick Downloads page of this website.