Hi Andrew,

USGS has some products that may be of use.

Earth Exporer, http://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/ has various collections of imagery and depending on where you're looking could go back as far as the late 1930s. You have to sign up for an account to access the data.

The National Agricultural Image Program or NAIP has 1m or better resolution flown during the growing season across the US. https://www.fsa.usda.gov/programs-and-services/aerial-photography/imagery-programs/naip-imagery/ Not a USGS site.

You may also access the National Archives, http://www.archives.gov/research/order/maps.html may be of some help. I've used them in some of the past research that I've done where I needed old aerial photographs. Not a USGS site.

Topoview, http://ngmdb.usgs.gov/maps/TopoView/ has the majority of our USGS topographic quadrangles that were produced, over 200,000 of them have been scanned and georegistered and saved as either geopdf or geotiff files. The GeoTiffs would be the ones you would want to bring into GIS for any time series analysis. They are scanned at 600 dpi so have great resolution.

US TOPO, http://viewer.nationalmap.gov/basic/?basemap=b1&category=ustopo&title=US%20Topo%20Download is where you can download current and historic USGS quadrangles, like the Topoview above but the majority here will be geopdfs and not much use in a GIS.

The National Map, http://viewer.nationalmap.gov/launch/ provides a place to download GIS data across the US. It is suitable for 1:24,000 scale mapping projects.

There is a new Map Template or TNM Style Template, http://viewer.nationalmap.gov/tools/topotemplate/ that you can use in ArcGIS. It will provide the user with essentially a USGS 7.5 minute quadrangle template that you can populate with data from The National Map. There is a nice tutorial that you download with the template file that explains how to use it.

I'm happy to answer questions you or your colleague may have about our mapping products.

Cheers,

Tom

Tom Carlson, PhD, GISP

National Map Liaison for Washington, Oregon and Idaho

US Geological Survey

934 Broadway, Suite 300

Tacoma, WA 98402

253.552.1682 Office

253.552.1581 Fax

The National Map - Your Source for Topographic Information

On Mon, Aug 15, 2016 at 7:38 AM, andrew nicholson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Hi everyone,

I am a GIS Librarian up in Canada at the University of Toronto, and it has been awhile since i have worked with US GIS data.

I working with a Professor interested in urban change and mapping. Would anyone know of a urban change dataset for Las Vegas that could be shared for use in a teaching lab? I am just looking for a historical collection of aerial or sat images, census polygons, and perhaps some land use files.

Any suggestions would be welcome.

Many thanks,

Andrew

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Andrew Nicholson

Coordinator, GIS & Research Data Services

University of Toronto Mississauga Library

[log in to unmask]