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usfs-fstopo

Forest Service FSTopo 7.5-minute sheets for your US map regions, with trail numbers

What it does

Downloads the Forest Service's FSTopo map sheets covering your map regions -- its own 7.5-minute series over National Forest land -- as GeoTIFFs from the Forest Service's raster gateway, and keeps them under /usr/local/share/hammunition/data/usfs-fstopo/. An FSTopo sheet is the forest's own topographic map: Forest Service trails with their trail numbers, forest roads by number, 40 ft contours and the forest's boundaries. ustopo-qmapshack, installed with it or later, makes them a second QMapShack map, FSTopo.vrt, beside the US Topo one.

Why you would want it

On a National Forest the signpost, the ranger district's notices and the trail log name a trail by its number, and only the Forest Service's own sheet prints it. OpenStreetMap usually has the line; this has the number the Forest Service uses, offline.

Before it will work

Map regions set in station config; the sheets follow them. With none set this unit is deferred by name. Only regions with National Forest land have sheets (none in Delaware, for example); a region with none gets a note in the plan and nothing fails.

How it installs

  • topographic map sheets from usfs-fstopo for the regions in station config (Public domain (USDA Forest Service, US federal work), https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#105)

Known problems

Installed by name only (hammunition install usfs-fstopo), never by a profile: the Forest Service publishes no checksum for a sheet, and the project's rule is that a non-apt source without one is not installed by default. The unit may rejoin the navigation profile, by a dated amendment to D-068, once every sheet a region needs is pinned; the plan then says "every FSTopo quad your regions need is pinned by Hammunition". The Forest Service publishes no checksum for a sheet, so unless the maintainer has measured and pinned one in catalog/data/fstopo-pins.yaml, a sheet is fetched unverified: only its size, as the gateway announces it at plan time, and its being a TIFF are checked. That catches a truncated download or a web page in its place, not a deliberately altered sheet. The plan says "unverified" for every such sheet by name and counts them; the pins file starts empty. A sheet is about 21 MB (one George Washington National Forest sheet, measured 2026-09-29); the GTAC index lists 87 sheets primarily in Vermont and 247 in Virginia, and a region's outline also touches sheets across its borders. The plan prints the count and size per region before anything downloads. A pinned sheet the Forest Service re-issued is refused by name until it is pinned again. Sheet names are places, so they are shown in the plan only. QMapShack drawing these sheets has not been measured yet.

Keeping it current

  • probe: none
  • strategy: reinstall
  • The Forest Service re-issues a sheet now and then; the index's vintage changes with it. hammunition update counts the installed sheets the carried index lists at a newer vintage; installing again fetches those and removes the older ones.

Where to get help with the software itself

The Forest Service's raster gateway (https://data.fs.usda.gov/geodata/rastergateway/) and the Geospatial Technology and Applications Center for the sheets themselves.

Source: catalog/packages/usfs-fstopo.yaml