 Alright, hey everybody, I am going to walk you through a simple process on how to create a contour map with free software and Google Earth, so let's get started. So here in the directions that you all have the link to, you'll see the steps for making a base and topographic map in Google Earth. And Google Earth Pro is free and easy to download, you just got to click on the link here which will take you to this page, you'll see that it's all in Spanish because that is, I live in Spain and my computer is configured that way. But you just have to accept and download and once you have that installed on your computer we can get moving forward. So from there you'll click on this link to the free contour map creator, which I have open here. All you got to do is type in your direction and I'll be using an example of a property that I've been taking a look at over the last couple of months in a town called Calesta in Montmoy. Now this brings up the town and I know from having been to this place before that the property is over in this area and all you have to do is press control and use the scroll wheel on your mouse to zoom in or zoom out and then click on the left mouse key to move around on the site until you have yourself positioned more or less where you want. Now this is the property that I'm going to be taking a look at and it's more or less in the center of the screen. The next step to creating our map is to set the parameters and all you have to do is click in the top left corner of where you want it to be which will leave this little red indicator just like in Google Maps and in the bottom right which will define the parameters of your map and you can move these around even after they've been set to get it just exactly where you want. I would highly recommend making a map quite a bit larger than the actual property that you want to get contour lines on because you want to see the lay of the land all around and it's going to give you the information that you need to see and read the landscape as to where water is going to be directed in contrast to where the contour lines run. So this is more or less correct and from there we just go down and tweak with the settings a little bit in our sampling our plot options and the other settings that we have down below. The sampling here now that we've put in our parameters for our map up above these red dots all you have to do is press get data and that will immediately put in the latitude and longitude for each of the points that you have put with your cursor above. Now as soon as you press the get data option it's already going to put in contour lines based on the settings that are here in your plot options. Now this is not enough or specific enough data for the map that we're trying to make so we want to tweak these a little bit the number of levels for the size of the map that I have here I'm going to put at 100 you can put any amount that you need and get the data again in order to see how it turns out I would recommend not putting much more than 200 because it starts to take a really long time to load. In the level interval here which is set for meters which you can change here from meters to feet if you prefer to work in imperial measurements. 5 meters is a bit too large of elevation drop to give us the type of data that we need. For a map this size I would recommend going at about 1 meter or you could do 0.5 for 50 centimeters or half a meter. Once we have the settings in the plot options the way that we like we press get data again and it's going to take a little while for it to load now that we have more contour lines in but you can see that this is the high point and this is the low point on my map and all of these different colors in between are indicators of different elevation levels based on our 0.5 50 centimeter difference in elevation for each of these lines. I would encourage you to play around with these settings a little bit and change the parameters of your map to get exactly what you want. This map generator draws from a lot of different mapping sources including Google and a couple of other sources from from databases around the internet and so you can see that there are areas of boxes and squares where there is more defined data and less defined data. That's just what it is that's what we get with free software. This is good enough to create a topographic base map for your needs in this course or for starting out before you decide to invest any money and getting more specific data. So to get started with this first we need to save our file and you're going to scroll down past all this version history options till you get down to this download KML file which is a blue link just above the contour map without the base map underneath it so that you don't get lost in scrolling down here you're going to click on that and it will give you an option of where to save your file and you can save that wherever you need and change the title here just be sure not to delete the KML at the end. One more cool thing that you can do on Google Earth is you can access it from your browser. I'm in Google Chrome right now but I'm pretty sure it'll work for any browser that you tend to use and by going to earth.google.com it'll give you basically the same user face as you would find by downloading the pro version and by going into this access portal here you can sign in if you have a Google account which will allow you to save any changes that you make in any maps that you build on your Google account for later access via the web. Down here with this little indicator over a map icon you can build your own projects and I've already imported the contour map that we've used and you just have to toggle it on with the little I button here and you can draw all the lines import and export information just like you would in the downloaded application version but this way just by accessing it from your browser. It's also a great way to access this information if you're on the go we're using a different device if you're not on the original computer or device that has the application installed so this is one other option.