I have no experience with GIS whatsoever. I really know squat about it.
I'm currently working on a project to plot locality data for wildlife on a map of Shasta County. This is for a new herpetological club that hopes to track strength of our local herp populations, since it seems evident that in the last 20 years we lost one species of frog and are close to losing another (probably less than 100 left and they don't seem to be successfully breeding) and the declines were known, but the extent of the declines was not known well enough until it was too late. We want to try and prevent that with other species in our county by keeping records of where they currently are and where they use to be but are no longer found. When we see what appears to be shrinking range, we can investigate and if need be, request surveys by wildlife management before it is too late.
Basically - the data will be plotted as a grid of regular hexagons. When locality information (museum record or photo voucher record in our own database) exists, the hexagon the record sits in gets drawn a pretty color (depending on type and age of records).
I have it working on a raster (jpg) map where I guessed the latitude/longitude borders - working well enough with sample data that I know my php code works, but while it is ballpark accurate I need to do it with maps of known values.
Quick and dirty option - obtain (possibly pay for) a large (at least 2k pixels wide) raster map with known lat/lon borders that has the county outline, major lakes and rivers, nothing else. The maps could be made and then resized for web view. The major problem with that model is that drawing colored hexagons near the county border and near rivers will make it more difficult to see them, thus making it harder to interpret the map.
What I would prefer to do -
Draw my data hexagons on a blank slate [ via imagecreate(width,height) function), then draw the county border on top of that, and then on top of that either draw the lakes/rivers and/or basic topographical lines.
My preference obviously includes getting data sets for those things (county border, lakes/rivers, topography) in a format that I can parse with php to draw them with gd.
My county does have some GIS data available: http://www.shastagis.co.shasta.ca.us/gissearch/search_new.aspx
I don't have a clue how to get that data into format useful for drawing with gd via php.
Anyone have experience with this? Can anyone recommend a (preferably free) Linux GIS program that works on CentOS that could potentially convert data files into format useful for drawing with gd?
I don't need to get fancy with zoom, rotate, etc. capabilities - just a basic static flat map output.
Thanks for any suggestions. I may try to find a "GIS for dummies" type book, though I've generally not been fond of dummy books, I kind of feel like one when it comes to GIS.