Sorry for the slight delay, but I wasn't feeling in a particularly mappy mood yesterday, and my laptop was running glacially slow, so I threw in the towel halfway through the latest patch with the intent of finishing it today. Didn't really feel like replying to anything either, so that's all going here now.
And considering you added the ice caps on top of mounts Rainier and Baker, Greenland and the northwestern coast of America are going to have an extra layer of complexity. Good luck with that.
Yup, the only saving grace is that I've done ice sheets patches before, so I know what I'm dealing with, but I'll get it done.
As a sidenote, I generated with GIS a Robinson map of the PNW using Natural Earth as a source (at ~1.17X the scale of your map, did it in a rush), and the ice caps look different, what was your criteria for them?
I'm going for permanent ice cover, primarily using the 8K-BAM (which you helped create if I remember correctly - do you remember what sources you used for that?), with refinements made via google maps. On that note I'd say that map you produced is a little too excessive showing ice cover than the one I'm working from.
I would like to ask if having a different color for natural lakes and man-made reservoirs is possible? Doing an althist map of 1800 but having all the dams there is always a pain for me.
Probably best for natural lakes to be the same color as the coast while man-made reservoirs are like a dark blue that can easily be grabbed in a paint program and filled with the land color.
I would personally say go with an addendum file if possible to differentiate more recent natural lakes/reservoirs from older ones.
On the subject of reservoirs, for the current map I'll be keeping reservoirs and natural lakes the same colour, but I could whip up separate map distinguishing reservoirs with a different colour without too much difficulty, so I'll probably do that as well.
One annoying problem is that reservoirs didn't all just appear at once - in the US alone some were first constructed in the 1920's, while others were filled as late as the 90's, which is why I earlier suggested a series of decade-by-decade time-slices showing new reservoirs added through the twentieth century to help with historical maps from that period. Before then I'd rely on the good old historical geography patch, to deal with things like the Salton Sea (created by accident in 1905), Reelfoot Lake (mentioned previously), or former Lake Tulare (previously the largest freshwater lake in the US west of the Mississippi, it was drained entirely in the latter 19th century).
Anyway, time for ...
Patch 7 - the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef;
- Added the Mexican state of Quintana Roo, plus major associated reefs (only really the Banco Chinchorro atoll, see notes below)
- Added Belize, with major reef complexes, atolls and cays.
- Added the Belize-Guatemala territorial dispute, showing Guatemalan claims to Belize and the disputed border.
A few notes on this one. While the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef continues all the way north to Cancun, as it hugs the coast for most of that distance I didn't really feel like adding it, except when it cut across the entrance to two notable bays. I'm also annoyed to see that my standard 'disputed/undefined border' colour is annoyingly close to the main colour for Guatemala, but I don't really feel like changing it so it'll stay for now.
(please dont remake the mbam by the way, i already have plans for it)
