Pinpointing multiple locations with a satellite printout

Pinpoining multiple locations of trees from a satellite printout of approximate locations.

This third method is similar to the second. If you have a spreadsheet with some new trees and the estimated lat and lon information, you can make a My Map and then print it out and take it to the location. Then you can go to the approximate locations and mark where the trees really are. The advantage of this approach is you can locate multiple trees with one trip to the field, then transfer the locations by dragging markers when you are back at your desk.

This is extracted from a spreadsheet for trees to be added (or removed) from the database. The temporary Lat and Lon data was extracted from Geo-tagged photos. Use this Google Sheets spreadsheet to create a Google My Map.

This is a Google My Map showing the four trees located with data from the Geo-tagged photos that were provided by Debbie Lux.

With the satelitte printouts on a clipboard, we can go to the locations and determine the exact locations of the trees.

In this satellite view of the Southern Magnolia in Rushmore, we determined a location in reference to buildings and other trees.

Location of the Green Weeping Japanese Maple determined from the satellite view with reference to adjacent building, trees and other landmarks.

This is a current photo (January 2025) of the location where the Trident Maple was located according to the geo-tagged photo. Since the time of planting the area has been torn up for construction of the new swimming pool, so apparently the tree is gone.

This shows the observed location of the Cornelian Cherry Tree near a Bridlington apartment.

Use observed location with Google My Maps to determine acurate Latitude and Longitude

On your computer, open the Google My Map made previously to show the Four New Trees (the map is shown above.)
Starting with the Southern Magnolia in Rushmore, zoom in to the maximum level.
Click on the Marker for the tree. In the pop-up window, click on the pencil in order to edit the location by dragging the marker from the geo-tagged location to the observed location.
Click on the marker and drag it to the location observed and marked on the satellite printout. Once it is in the right place, click on the marker again to bring up the pop-up window. This will save your changes.
At this point, you can copy the updated Latitude and Longitude information, or you can wait and download the updated infomation for all the trees on the map.
Repeat steps 1 to 5 for the remaining trees on the map. (Disregard the Trindent Maple, which apparently doesn't exist anymore.)

Click on the pencil icon to edit.

Transfering the new location data

In the previous steps, Pinpointing location with an iPhone and Pinpointing with a satellite printout, there was only one location for one tree to manually add to the master spreadsheet. However in this procedure we are finding the location for multiple trees, and that corrected data will be included in the data table for the Google My Map that was used.

In this procedure we have locations for three trees. This location data is included in the Data Table for the Google My Map "Four New Trees" that we used to update the location data from that derived from geo-tagged photos to observed locations.

The Data Table from the Google My Map shows the updated locations (except for the Trident Maple which is gone).

The Data Table can be exported to a CSV file, which can then be converted to a Google Sheets spreadsheet on the Google Drive (or another spreadsheet format like Microsoft Excel or Apple Numbers.)

On the Google My Map click on the three verticle dots adjacent to the Four New Trees layer (not the three dots at the title at the top).
Click on the last item, Export data
Click on CSV
This will result in a CSV file with all the data being downloaded to your Download folder.

This spreadsheet file can be used to transfer the data for all these trees to the Arboretum Master list.

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