Welcome to the National Park Service Interactive Map Center (IMC). The purpose of this site is to enhance your web-based National Park Service experience through a Geographical User Interface.

The IMC contains information about and maps of national parks. The IMC delivers base maps and park brochure maps for geographic reference and navigation to and within parks. Across the top of the webpage are TAB's that switch you from Park Locator, to Park Atlas, to Resource Links and On-line Help. The Park Locator gives you the ability to identify and navigate to any park in the National Park System. The Park Atlas Allows you to explore the mapped resources for all parks. In both Atlas and Locator applications you can view maps from a national view down through high-resolution views of individual parks.

Please check the help tab for explanations of the function buttons and use of the system.

The site was developed by gathering geographic information systems (GIS) data from all national parks and then merging the data into national GIS layers. Currently there are only a few basic layers for each park, but more data will be added in the future. Other NPS databases were integrated for searching and to provide more interesting geographic presentations of those data. If you are a geography student or GIS specialist you may be interested in browsing and using the original park GIS data or learning more about how GIS is used to support park management.

The technology providing the map services is produced by Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI), a supplier of GIS software and related services.

Please let us know how you like the IMC and what sort of maps or services you would like to see in the future. Thank you. (send email to maps@tekkie.itc.nps.gov)

ESRI donated the development phase of Internet hosting and operations for the IMC to the National Park Service. They were also instrumental in developing the site starting in the spring of 2001. The National Park Service is thankful to ESRI for providing this support and service and hopes to expand this partnership. National Geographic Maps donated TOPO (seamless USGS DRG) map products for the Park Atlas.