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Balds, Overlooks, & Towers

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Balds As of 4/10/2024, balds have been merged with overlooks in the Tennessee Landforms primary dataset. They are still distinguishable by their names (which all include the word "Bald" somewhere). As they are a subset of the new feature type, overlooks, this made the most sense in terms of simplifying the dataset. They have been reassigned IDs which are consistent with overlooks. For example Big Chestnut Bald , once SV B 001, is now SV O 001. Overlooks Fish Gap Hill Overlook, Obion County; Chuck Sutherland An update I've been working on for the last week involved adding a lot more overlooks (approximately 100) to the already plentiful data that I had been amassing for years. The current dataset has 165 overlooks (with the inclusion of balds) of various qualities across the state. For you West Tennessee folks, you'll be excited to see that you actually have some. While on assignment for Roadside Geology of Tennessee many years ago, I had photograp
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Inclusion and Exclusion of Data not in Tennessee

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While reviewing, cleaning, and enhancing the data of Tennessee Landforms I found several points which while close to being inside of Tennessee, I opted to exclude from this dataset. My reasoning is that the points inside Kentucky fall within the purview of my friend's work at Kentucky Landforms. The North Carolina point falls within several datasets of North Carolina data. Removal from Tennessee Landforms doesn't mean removal from existence in other words. However, I present the data here, in the event that any other data sources are lost. ID Lat Long Name Type County Reference Notes CTF004 36.198700 -81.969500 Elk/
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Geoprivacy

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Geoprivacy, while defined as "individual rights to prevent disclosure of the location of one's home, workplace, daily activities, or trips," should also extend to "things that people have on their property." If we consider further, it should also extend to protecting those who have no voice, like the forest, the plains, our natural spaces, and their inhabitants. The knowledge of location information is a double-edged sword. At once it satisfies our insatiable curiosity of "what's over there?" but also allows for abuse of secret, hidden, and sensitive places. How then should a landform website, whose objective is to share location information, handle such a moral conundrum? I have carefully crafted a mission statement so that I can refer back to it when forgetful and be held accountable when questioned. The mission of Tennessee Landforms is to serve the outdoor and scientific communities and facilitate the responsible documentation and s
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Hello world!

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Snoopers Rock Sunrise; Kelli Lewis-Sutherland This is the inaugural post of the Tennessee Landforms Blog. I'll be using this medium (among others) to relay relevant news regarding the website, its updates, and featured content. If you don't know me, my name is Chuck Sutherland. I have taken over (will be taking over, depending on your perspective) Tennessee Landforms from Tom Dunigan. Tom has other things going on right now which are more important than his well loved website. We had spoken several years ago about when this moment would come and how he wanted to handle it. He has passed the backend data of his old website to me at this point (March of 2024), and I've spent the last month or so building out an ESRI Hub Site using Tennessee Tech University's (TTU) organization subdomain. I teach Theory of GIS I and Theory of GIS II at TTU, and students are actively involved in the development of the datasets and website. As I build out the new website,
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