Matt Smith wrote:The 1998 [National Stag Beetle] survey report included . . . 1km dot records overlaid onto a map of the basic geology of Britain. . . Unfortunately no one . . . can help me with how this was produced. I have contacted Alan Morton at DMAP who does not know of any geological BDY files like this that might be used with DMAP, and the British Geological Survey website is fairly incomprehensible. Can anyone help me with this, or suggest how such a map might be created?
Although 9 months too late to help you, your question merits a fuller reply as the solution may well be of interest to other DMAP users. And part of that solution is even on the DMAP website!
1) Charles and Darwyn were right to point you towards the free downloadable BGS maps at 1:625,000 scale. Both Solid and Drift maps of the whole UK are in MapInfo and ArcView formats at this url which you will need to download and unzip: http://www.bgs.ac.uk/products/digitalmaps/data_625k.html
2) Open as a Table in MapInfo. Having checked the file in MapInfo, export this table in MapInfo Interchange Format (.MIF) via Table>Export>Export Table.
3) From Alan Morton's own DMAP website (www.dmap.co.uk) download his superb little conversion tool DAT2BDY.EXE from the "Add-On Utilities" section. This will convert the .MIF file into a single .BDY which DMAP can read (certainly DMAP version 7.x) will cope with it. You may need to experiment with the settings of "Minimum distance between points" in DAT2BDY to keep the resultant file size down to a sensible level and sensible accuracy for plotting in your region.
4) Once you confirm this is a suitable DMAP boundary file for your needs, you would then face the not inconsiderable challenge of editing the BDY file to fill each with the suitable colours. Each separate geological type would need a line of text defining the fill colour. To get rid of the harsh defining line between each geological type, you also need to define the line colour to be the same as the fill colour. Unfortunately I've looked at the BDY file this process creates and for the whole UK there appear to be about 5,000 geological divisions you'd need to edit. This might be justifiable at a county level with relatively few rock types, but not practical at the UK level.
5) You need to ask BGS if they can supply even smaller scale digital data suitable for publication at around A5 (Perhaps 1:1,584,000 or even smaller). There's a good chance you could get this free if its for educational use. If you can I can send you a detailed article on how to work with DMAP boundary files to produce map like those I've put on our Flora of Derbyshire webpages at www.derby.gov.uk/flora. These show both basic alttude divisions plus Natural Area outlines - both derived from MapInfo.
Hoping this may be of use to someone!
Nick Moyes
Derbyshire (Derby Museum) Biological Records Centre
