THE Iowa DNR Interactive Mapping website allows you to access several Iowa DNR interactive maps through your web browser (Internet Explorer). If you are a more "advanced" GIS user you can access the same data/maps through Iowa DNR Interactive Mapping map services.

There are many benefits to using our map services instead of the web browser interactive maps that exist on this website. With a map service you can overlay your own GIS data with data from an interactive map. You can add your own local data to data on one of our interactive maps. You can also add other Internet map services to the Iowa DNR map services, and to your local data. For example, if you have a map server website for a county in Iowa with county-level data, you can view that county data on top of the data in an Iowa DNR interactive map (like the Water Monitoring Atlas). If you have a map server web address for a national or world map, you can add that data to your map project as well.

Using the Iowa DNR map services will allow you to have more flexibility in the kind of map you want to create, such that you can combine it with countless other maps that are served through map services on the Internet, as well as with your own local data.

All of the Iowa DNR map services are image services, with the exception of the Watershed Atlas service. An image service is retrieved by the user's software in the form of a JPG image. The data can be interacted with to the same extent as the Interactive Mapping sites, and they are the "best performance" services. However, the image services are not as flexible as feature services.

The Watershed Atlas service is a feature service. With the Watershed Atlas feature service, you can retrieve all point, line, and polygon data that is viewable on the Watershed Atlas interactive map. This means you have the ability to change symbology of the layers, change the label field for the layers, export data directly to SHP, and print large-sized maps at a high resolution. However, there are 2 major problems with using a feature service, like the Watershed Atlas. One is that the performance is not as good as the performance of an image service. The second is that you won't receive any raster-based data layers that are viewable on the Watershed Atlas interactive map, including Air Photography (CIR and NAIP), Topos, Soil-related grids (Soil Loss, etc.). If you want to use Watershed Atlas data, but prefer to use the image service, then you should choose the Water Monitoring Atlas image service, which contains the same datasets as the Watershed Atlas.

There are many methods for using the Iowa DNR Interactive Mapping map services. Click on the links below to get step-by-step help on how to use 2 of the most common methods:

Using the free ArcExplorer Web 9.0 software to connect to Iowa DNR Interactive Mapping map services.

Using the desktop GIS software ArcGIS 9 to connect to the Iowa DNR Interactive Mapping map services.