Fees and Easements, Northeastern U.S., Protected Areas Database of the United States, 2005-2016

As mentioned in the Abstract section of this metadata record, the PAD-US database strives to be a complete “best available” inventory of areas dedicated to the preservation of biological diversity, and other natural, recreational or cultural uses, managed for these purposes through legal or other effective means. This includes both fee ownership of lands as well as management through leases, easements or other binding agreements. The data also tracks designations identified in management plans (i.e. BLM Area of Environmental Concern) or other internal management designations (e.g. Inventoried Roadless Areas). All of these factors provide for a robust yet complex dataset. It is important to have in mind a specific analysis question, when approaching how to work with the data. As a full inventory of protected areas by name and management designation, aggregated from authoritative source data, PAD-US includes legitimately overlapping designation types and sliver errors. Overlapping designations largely occur in the federal theme of the "fee" or "combined" feature classes (e.g. Wilderness Area over a Wild and Scenic River and National Forest), these are important to note especially when trying to calculate overall area statistics, as these overlaps can count the same area of ground multiple times. Many overlaps may be removed from the federal theme by selecting where "Category" = 'Designation'. Otherwise a specific data query should be performed or rasterization on a priority field before tallying area from the raw database. Area stats are available from the PAD-US website: http://gapanalysis.usgs.gov/padus/data/statistics/. As the PAD-US database is a direct aggregation of source data, the PAD-US development team does not alter the spatial linework in anyway, except to “clip” the data along State boundary lines using the official PAD-US state boundary file provided by Census. For both of these reasons some data silvers occur in the dataset. There are many overlapping edge slivers between source datasets and some slivers that are created by the state boundary file. Major sliver and data overlap errors have been identified and shared with agency data stewards for correction in source files that will then be incorporated in subsequent PAD-US versions over time. Boundaries containing overlapping federal management designations can be selected using a query of the data where "Category" = Designation. This will select the areas that are management designations, that can either be analyzed by designation type, or removed from the data to reduce overlap. GAP intends to identify additional overlapping designations managed by state and other agencies in the next PAD-US update. GAP conducts separate analyses to summarize area statistics for PAD-US attributes such as: Owner Name, Manager Name, GAP Status Code, IUCN Category, and State Name. GAP also provides select data from PAD-US for the USGS National Map (http://nationalmap.gov/). Contact the PAD-US Coordinator for more information before conducting area related analyses. IUCN Categorized protected areas are sent following PAD-US updates to global partners managing the North American PAD (http://CEC.org ) and World Database for Protected Areas (WDPA, http://protectedplanet.net ).
For completeness estimates by state: http://www.protectedlands.net/partners. For more information regarding the PAD-US dataset please visit, http://gapanalysis.usgs.gov/padus/. To find more data resources as well as view example analysis performed using PAD-US data visit, http://gapanalysis.usgs.gov/padus/resources/. The PAD-US dataset and data standard are compiled and maintained by the USGS Gap Analysis Program, http://gapanalysis.usgs.gov/ . For more information about data standards and how the data are aggregated please review the “Standards and Methods Manual for PAD-US,” http://gapanalysis.usgs.gov/padus/data/standards/ .

Title

National Gap Analysis Program (GAP) - Protected Areas Data Portal

Associated with

USGS National Gap Analysis Program

Imprint

2016

Title

Protected Areas Database of the United States (PAD-US)

Imprint

2016