Part 4—Explore More Extreme Evironments by Importing Images and Data
It is possible to import spreadsheet data into GeoMapApp if the data contain latitude and longitude fields. In addition, if URLs for image files stored on the Internet are included, then those images will be linked directly to their locations and displayed using the Image Viewer. You can use this same process to load GPS data into GeoMapApp via a spreadsheet that you create.
Step 1 – Download a Spreadsheet Template for Recording Data
- Right-click on a PC or control-click on a Mac on this Excel template (Excel 17kB Apr29 10) to download it. Save it to a place where you can easily find it on your computer.
- Launch Excel, choose File > Open, and navigate to where you saved the file. Then click OK.
- Look at the file. It has only the column headers. Notice that the words Latitude and Longitude are two of the column headers. These fields are required in order to successfully import the data. In addition, the spreadsheet has fields for a sequence number, depth information, and a title for the image as well as the link to a site on the Internet where that image is stored.
Show me what the template looks like
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Step 2 – Find An Image with Known Latitude and Longitude Coordinates
- Here is one image gallery of sealife around vents. In the next step, you will locate three images with latitude and longitude information and put them in an Excel spreadsheet. When all the information is in the spreadsheet, it will be imported into GeoMapApp and have place markers located on the map.
- In your browser window, scroll down to the bottom of the image gallery, and choose the "Anemone at the East Pacific Rise (2002)" image.
- Click on the text below the image. This will bring up an enlarged image in a new window and some information about where the image was taken.
Step 3 – Add the URL of the Image Plus Other Data as Needed to the Template
- Copy and paste the information for the latitude, longitude, depth, and create a sequence number (1,2,3...) in the appropriate column in the Excel template. Fill in a short title describing the image.
- Now, link the URL to the image. Right-click or control-click on the enlarged image. A drop-down menu choice in Safari is "Open Image in New Window". In Firefox, the menu choice is "View Image".
- The new image window has the link for the image in the browser URL space. Highlight and copy this URL.
- Paste the URL link into column F of your template.
- Now you have one row completed. Add in the second row, information about the image "Biological community in diffuse flow at EPR (2004)"; in the third row, complete the same information for the image "Tube worms near hydrothermal vents at EPR (2004)." You may need to scroll through the images in order to select the correct ones.
Step 4 – Import the Excel Template File into GeoMapApp
- Open GeoMapApp and start at the full Mercator map. (Remember that Bookmarks > Zoom to Global Scale will get you there).
- Select File > Import Spreadsheet or Table > From Excel-formatted (.xls) file, and choose the file EPR_sealife_template.xls that you have just filled with three images.
- You will see the world map with the table below it. When the Layer manager appears with the name of the Excel file you imported, use the "Zoom To" tool to go straight to the area of the EPR and the three images.
Step 5 – Explore the Imported Data
- Click on a row to highlight a location on the map. Notice the highlighted dot and the selected table row. To display the images from the "Image" column in the GeoMapApp window, select the Image Viewer, circled on the right of this image. Check this box to display the image.
- Now the image will be displayed when you select a row of the table.
- The reason you see no background ocean color is that these images were taken very close together and so the depth doesn't have much variation. The images were taken at depths within 50 meters of each other, and the color scale is grouped in hundreds and thousands of meters.
