File talk:Missouri - Taum Sauk-J Shutins area shaded relief.png

Boundaries of Taum Sauk Mountain State Park

After creating and posting this map my eye was caught by the fact that it depicts almost all of Church Mountain being incorporated into TSMSP. As documented and properly cited in the Taum Sauk Hydroelectric Power Station article, the electric company owns that mountain and would like to build a second pumped storage facility there. The state failed to get title to the property as part of the settlement it reached with the utility for damage caused to Johnson's Shutins State Park when the original pumped storage reservoir on Proffit Mountain broke.

Compare this map to the maps on the state parks website for the parks at Johnson's Shut-Ins and Taum Sauk Mountain. The former seems to agree with this map, but the latter does not. The boundaries shown here are those contained in the data file identified on the image description page, which apparently lives up to the disclaimer contained in the accompanying metadata: Although all data in this data set have been compiled by the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, no warranty, expressed or implied, is made by the department as to the accuracy of the data and related materials. This is not intended to be a survey product.

I will have to investigate whether there is a more accurate GIS file available for Missouri state parks, though I doubt there is a plethora of sources. I will also eyeball the conservation areas depicted to see if they agree with data and maps published by the Missouri Department of Conservation.

(As an aside, and in defense, let me call you attention to the fact that this map appears to be somewhat more accurate than what is depicted by Google Maps for these two parks. Curiously, their terrain view appears to indicate some sort of detached public domain over Church Mountain.)

Kbh3rd (talk) 18:43, 25 October 2010 (UTC)

Updated map

I've modified the map to reflect the boundaries shown in the map found on the official website of Missouri State Parks. To do this I used the georeferencer plug-in to QGIS to conform the map from the park's website to the coordinate reference system used in my map. This produced an imprefect result, and I had to adjust some of the boundaries by hand to the best that I could eyeball them. As a result, the disclaimer that "in no case should this map be relied upon as authoritative in terms of legal boundaries and land ownership" applies doubly. However, I believe that, at this scale, remaining discrepancies should be relatively minor, and that this map should be adequate to illustrate related articles in Wikipedia. The map at the right here shows the differences between the two sets of boundaries; those outlined in red and filed with cyan crosshatching are what is used on the detail map uploaded this date. Kbh3rd (talk) 02:14, 28 October 2010 (UTC)