Innovations in the national atlas

This Australian submission describes innovations in the third series of the Atlas of Australian Resources, then in production. It explains the move from separate map sheets and booklets to thin bound volumes combining maps, commentary, photographs and diagrams. Ten volumes were planned, with major maps also issued separately to make them available sooner. The account regards changes in content as especially important: Volume 1, Soils and Land Use, simplifies soil classifications for land-management interpretation and uses livestock-density classes, crop symbols and LANDSAT imagery to depict land use. Volume 3, Agriculture, largely reuses the 1975/76 statistical basis and spatial interpretation of the land-use map to present agriculture in the mid-1970s. For Volume 2, Population, the submission credits computer-assisted mapping of census data for 11 major cities with improving accuracy and reducing production time. Work in progress included a geological map distinguishing areas covered by Cainozoic deposits and a satellite-supported map of present vegetation; the vegetation project also planned a multipurpose mapping database.