Maps

Maps showing where Madagascar is relative to Africa, and where Ranomafana is relative to Madagascar and Tana (the capital).

           ¹

Map showing the road and the trail to Vato (the other major study site in RNP).

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Talatakely Trail System

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Talatakely Trail System (pdf format)¹

• 1:5000 scale map (Designed for 4 sheets of A4 paper)
• 1:5000 scale map (Designed for 4 sheets of 8.5x11" paper)
• 1:8400 scale map (Designed for 1 sheet of A4 paper)
• 1:8200 scale map (Designed for 1 sheet of 8.5x11" paper)
  The above were generated 21-Aug-2003
• point index (text file, Dec, 2000)
   
• ArcView shapefiles (Dec, 2000)
   
• Raw data

Vatoharanana Trail System

Produced 21-Aug-2003. (Data collected by Debra Durham and her team)

• 1:6850 scale map (Designed for A4 paper)
• 1:5000 scale map (Designed for A4 paper)
• 1:6650 scale map (Designed for US Letter paper)
• 1:5000 scale map (Designed for US Letter paper)
   
• Raw data file

Valohoaka Trail System

Produced 21-Aug-2003. (Data collected by Summer Arrigo-Nelson and her team)

• 1:8364 scale map (Designed for A4 paper)
• 1:5000 scale map (Designed for A4 paper)
• 1:8120 scale map (Designed for US Letter paper)
• 1:5000 scale map (Designed for US Letter paper)
   
• Raw data file

Trail system

The trail system consists of a series of trails through the forest. The basic trails of the system have letter names ("A", "B", "C", etc.), connector trails are named by concatenating the two trails they connect (ie. trail "BF" connects "B" trail to "F"). As the letters of the alphabet have run out other names have been used (like "Sylvia", "Sakay", "Slope", etc.). The trails are usually flagged approximately every 25m (some every 50m), each point is named by appending the distance from the start of the trail to the trail name, thus "A25" is 25m from the start of "A" trail.

Trail mapping methods

I (with the help of 3 Malgache guides and two teams of EarthWatchers) measured the (TTS) trails with a compass, tape measure and clinometer. The map was made using a least squares fit (unweighted).

I took a four hour average of the GPS position at Belle Vue and use that as base point of the map. I was able to get one other good reading with a differential GPS (from my base point) and used that to test the accuracy of my map. At a distance of about 450m from Belle Vue the compass/clinometer/tape measure map was off from the dGPS reading by 7.5m. The dGPS reading is itself off by about 5m. This suggests that the true distance between any two points of the map is within 1 or 2% of the distance shown on the map.

Data were taken using the same methods at the other two sites by Debra Durham and her guides at Vato and by Summer Arrigo-Nelson and her guides.

-- RNP Main -- Comments -- Copyright --

(Maps Copyright © 1999-2003 by George Williams, or by George Williams & Chia Tan, or by George Williams & Debora Durham or by George Williams & Summer Arrigo-Nelson and all were generated by map.exe, working on this dataset for Talatakely or this dataset for Vatoharanana, or this dataset for Valohoaka)

¹ All maps are oriented with true north towards the top of the page. The magnetic deviation in the TTS area is about -18°.