Atlassing your square requires knowledge of the habitats, topographic features (e.g., roads, water, elevation, etc.), point count locations, and other features within your square. The tools described below have been developed to assist participants with planning out their atlassing.

Printable topographic maps are available for most squares in the province, courtesy of the British Columbia Integrated Land Management Bureau. Our sincere thanks to the ILMB for creating these maps! If you already know your square number and want to start exploring and planning, select this link to download a map.

A live map viewer application is also available to project participants. The map viewer contains much of the same information as the printable PDF topographic maps, as well as supplementary data layers (e.g., Important Bird Areas). The map viewer is especially useful for navigating around the province, finding your square, and zooming in for a closer look. When available, functions for downloading PDF maps, obtaining bird data summaries, and other functions, can be found in the map viewer. Select this link to launch the map viewer in a new browser window (works best over a high speed Internet connection).

Spatial framework files (atlas squares, regions, blocks) in Google Earth format are available for those with access to internet. This software is free to users: http://earth.google.com/. The Google Earth applications works similarly to the Live Map Viewer. To use the Google Earth files, users must have Google Earth software downloaded on their computer. Download Google Earth files to you computer by clicking the Google Earth link above. Once you download, double-click the files to open in Google Earth. When exiting, select "yes" to save the files to "my places."

Files (atlas squares, regions, blocks) are also available in ESRI Shapefile format for those with access to more sophisticated GIS layers and desktop software.