Much of the range lands in Texas are owned and actively managed by ranchers and agricultural producers. One of the first steps ranchers should take, is to identify priority areas, points of contact, mapping of water sources, sensitive areas, fences, gates, and other zones within the ranch. This will allow firefighters to make tactical decisions that reflect the landowners’ priorities. Additionally, this information will provide a foundation for post-fire recovery services. 

Landowner Priorities Form

Landowner Priorities Example Form

Map My Property allows landowners and others to make a map of their property or other area of interest. Users can locate their property, draw and edit boundaries, circles, lines, points of interest, text labels, and export the map to a PDF file.

To map your ranch, visit Map My Property at: https://texasforestinfo.tamu.edu/mapmyproperty/.

 

 How do I use the Map My Property tools?

• To use the Map My Property tools, click the respective tool button to activate it, move the cursor to the map and begin adding points at each location where the boundary changes direction. Move the cursor in the direction of the next point and click to add a new point. Continue this until you draw the entire boundary. Double-clicking to add the last point will complete the drawing.
• To add features that are represented by lines, follow the same steps as for area polygons. To draw roads or fences for example, select the respective button to activate it, move the cursor to the map and begin adding points at each location where the line changes direction until you draw the entire line.

How do you connect two features?

• When drawing lines and polygons, if you need to connect the feature to another existing feature, hold the CTRL key, “Cmd” on Mac, on the keyboard and a blue crosshair cursor will indicate where the feature will be snapped to on the other feature.

How do I edit my drawing?

• If you are not satisfied with part of the drawing and want to edit it, click the drawn boundary or line to select it and enable editing mode. Notice the gray circular points. They are vertices. Click on each vertex and drag it to a new, desired location to edit the shape of the feature. To delete an existing vertex, right-click on it and select Delete. New vertices can be added by clicking on and dragging the "ghost" vertices (white circular points) to the desired location. The moved ghost vertex will then show as a new point (gray vertex). Ghost vertices are displayed halfway between two existing vertices.

How do I label my features?

• After each drawing, you have an option to create a label for the drawn feature by typing the label text in the popup window and clicking on Add Label. If you want to move a label, click on the label to select it, then click and drag it to the new location. If you need to change the rotation of the label, select it and click on the center top gray rectangle and rotate it to the desired angle. If you want to resize the label, you can hover any of the gray rectangles on the corners and drag the resize cursor that will appear until the label resizes to the desired extent.
• If a label is not added when first creating the feature, one can be added later by right-clicking on the feature and selecting Add Label from the context menu.

How do I undo my drawings?

• Clicking on the Clear button will delete all drawings created with the Map My Property tool. Clicking the Undo button will delete the last feature drawn. Clicking on it again will delete the next to last one drawn. This can be done to sequentially delete features in reverse order that they were added. The same functionality holds for the Redo button. Individual features can also be deleted by clicking on one to select it and then right-clicking on it and selecting Delete Entire Element.

How do I create a report?

• Click on the Create Report button to launch the Map My Property Report Builder, which has two tabs:
• Map - which shows the map with the features you created, can be used to map and zoom the map
• Form - where you can enter the information about your property before generating the report.

When creating a report, how do I generate a PDF?

• When creating a report, the Form tab must be filled out to generate a PDF. Within each section you can define several priorities. When you are satisfied with the information you entered, click “Generate PDF” to create your report.
• If you want to save the data with the map features and the information you entered in the form, in MMP* format, click on Save Data and it will save all the data to your local machine. If you want to continue working on your map and form again at another time, just use the Load/Save tool located below the Map My Ranch tool in this application, and it will load all the data containing the map features and the form information you previously created and saved to the MMP* file.

What is a MMP File?

• A MMP file, native to Map My Property, allows you to save and later load all the work that has been done in a mapping session including boundaries, lines, points, and labels. This option results in saving a single MMP file.