The U.S. Virgin Islands are an unincorporated territory of the United States, purchased from Denmark in 1917. The main islands are St. Thomas, St. John and, widely separated to the south, St. Croix. They have been mapped by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) at the scale of 1:24,000. These maps are in five colors with contours at 40 ft or 20 ft intervals according to relief gradients. The projection is Polyconic (Clarke 1866 ellipsoid), to which a UTM grid has been added in revised versions.
Soviet military topographic mapping of the U.S. Virgin Islands is available at the following scales: 1:1,000,000 (1 sheet, complete coverage, published in 1966); 1:500,000 (2 sheets, complete coverage, published in 1979) and 1:200,000 (4 sheets, complete coverage, published 1966-1976). These products are available in print, digital raster and digital vector GIS formats from East View Geospatial.
A 1:326,856 scale nautical chart of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands is published by the National Ocean Service (NOS).
A geological map of St. Croix was published in 1961 by Williams and Heintz for the Geological Society of America, accompanying GSA Memoir 98.
Five sheets cover the St. Thomas and St. John group, and three cover St. Croix. The original sheets were mapped by aerial photogrammetry and published in the period 1955-58. In 1982 they were all photorevised, with the revisions overprinted in purple.
St. John boasts the only National Park in the Caribbean, although Martinique has a Parc Régional.
Island Resources Foundation (IRF) is an environmental NGO which supports conservation issues in the islands. Land use mapping of the islands was completed in 1989.
A large number of cheap and simple tourist maps of the islands have been produced, many incorporating retailers’ advertisements to attract cruising visitors: Charlotte Amalie on St Thomas is the main cruising center. Among them are cartoon sketch maps by Linda Smith Palmer with ‘views’ of the main shopping and dining areas.
The Official road map of the Virgin Islands is published by the Government of the Virgin Islands, Charlotte Amalie, with cartography by Gousha. There is also a well researched tourist map by Philip A. Schneider of Urbana-Champaign, USA, and other maps are published by Berndtson and Berndtson (B&B), Cartographers Ltd and International Travel Maps (ITM).
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