Land Data Notes

We're starting with the USGS Protected Areas Database (PAD).

PAD-US data features

PAD-US is available as a zipped national, DOI Region, or state geodatabase or shapefile. The following are included in PAD-US:

• Geographic boundaries of public land ownership (primarily Federal and State, local government data is incorporated with increasing frequency) and voluntarily provided private conservation lands (e.g., Nature Conservancy Preserves or land trust easements) from authoritative data sources.
• Standardized and original land owner, land manager, management designation and parcel name descriptions, areas and the source of geographic information of each mapped land unit.
• GAP Status Code – conservation measure of each parcel based on protection level categories that provide a measure of management intent for the long-term protection of biodiversity.
• IUCN category – a globally inter operable conservation measure required for a protected area’s inclusion into UNEP-World Conservation Monitoring Centre’s (WCMC) World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA).
• Reference information – aggregator source and original GIS source and dates.
• See “Supplemental_Info.txt” and metadata files included in download for more information.

Known Limitations

Some agencies seem to have only submitted partial accounts of the land under their jurisdiction. "For example, Federal agencies estimate the percent completeness of lands data submitted for PAD-US 2.0 as: NPS (95%), USFS (99%), FWS (89%), BLM (85%), USACE (80%), DOD (79%), USBR (50%), NRCS (85%), BOEM (95%), NOAA (95%)." source