{"id":82102,"date":"2019-02-01T14:18:48","date_gmt":"2019-02-01T22:18:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/?post_type=arcnews&p=82102"},"modified":"2023-06-01T12:04:34","modified_gmt":"2023-06-01T19:04:34","slug":"building-a-complete-gis-database-of-protected-areas","status":"publish","type":"arcnews","link":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/arcnews\/building-a-complete-gis-database-of-protected-areas","title":{"rendered":"Building a Complete GIS Database of Protected Areas"},"author":1312,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"sync_status":"","episode_type":"","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","castos_file_data":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[981,1031,291],"tags":[321,351,1441],"arcnews_issues":[58812],"class_list":["post-82102","arcnews","type-arcnews","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-green-infrastructure","category-natural-resources","category-nonprofit","tag-parks","tag-planning","tag-resilience","arcnews_issues-spring-2017","arcnews_sections-news"],"acf":{"short_description":"By 2020, it will be feasible to find GIS data for any park or other protected area in the United States.","pdf":{"host_remotely":false,"file":"","file_url":""},"flexible_content":[{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"

USGS Leads Inventory of Lands in the Public Interest<\/h2>\r\nBy Lisa Johnson and Mason Croft, United States Geological Survey and Boise State University, and Larry Orman, GreenInfo Network<\/strong>"},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":82112,"image_position":"right","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"By 2020, it will be feasible to find GIS data for any park or other protected area in the United States. In fact, it's almost possible now.\r\n\r\nThe Protected Areas Database of the United States (PAD-US) is the official GIS inventory of public parks and other protected areas in all US states and territories. It contains 3 billion land and marine acres managed by more than 15,000 agencies and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in over 150,000 separate parks and protected areas.\r\n\r\nDeveloped and managed by the US Geological Survey's (USGS) Core Science Analytics, Synthesis, and Libraries, the most recent data\u2014published as version 1.4 in May 2016\u2014has close-to-complete data for federal and state agencies. PAD-US also has nonsensitive easement data from the National Conservation Easement Database and information on marine protected areas from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). What's left to finish are the regional and local levels, where detailed data is only available for about 15 states.\r\n\r\nA just-released action plan for USGS lays out what's needed to complete PAD-US by 2020, and scheduled updates to the dataset for this year and 2018 are key steps along the way. For the first time, planners, conservationists, and many others can now look forward to having parks and protected areas all mapped out in the next three years."},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":82122,"image_position":"left","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"

Using PAD-US<\/h3>\r\nThe\u00a0data in PAD-US<\/a>\u00a0can be used to meet a wide range of needs. For example, app developers who are working on park finder apps, like Recreation.gov, or ParkRx apps, which allow doctors to prescribe park use to patients with chronic diseases, can use PAD-US to build their web apps. The National Wildfire Coordinating Group can use the database to effectively manage fire response. Communities and nonprofits can use it to define conservation priorities for habitats and species. And it provides a framework for tracking federal and state Land and Water Conservation Fund investments.\r\n\r\nRegional and county planners can also use PAD-US to better assess park needs in their areas, and local and state governments can use the maps and data to calculate parks' economic benefits when coming up with tourism-based economic development ideas and to better guide visitors to local parkland. Additionally, land planners can employ PAD-US to site the best locations for energy and transmission facilities.\r\n\r\nThe PAD-US database is particularly useful to anyone who needs regional data as well, including counties; intrastate, multistate, and national organizations; research bodies; and planning and policy groups. The data is also available as an\u00a0ArcGIS web map<\/a>, making it easy for Esri users to find it and apply it to their work."},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":82132,"image_position":"right","orientation":"vertical","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"

What's Under the Hood?<\/h2>\r\nPAD-US is a complex dataset developed by integrating scores of data flows from land-owning and management agencies, as well as NGOs. At its core, PAD-US defines the boundaries of public parks and protected areas owned and managed by governments and nonprofits, including terrestrial and marine areas.\r\n\r\nTo get federal, state, and NGO data into PAD-US, USGS works with federal agencies and data stewards\u2014such as state governments, universities, and nonprofits\u2014to aggregate data for state and local parks and protected areas. With more than 30,000 state, regional, local, and NGO land managers, state aggregators create a distributed yet viable system for gathering the data.\r\n\r\nThe PAD-US development team manages all the data in ArcGIS in a file geodatabase. Geodatabase domains help PAD-US data managers standardize attributes. Having multiple feature class representations supports data development and managing overlapping designations.\r\n\r\nPAD-US web mapping services, which provide users with ready-made interpretations of the data, are available through USGS and shared via ArcGIS Server 10.3 and later, including ArcGIS Enterprise. The\u00a0USGS PAD-US Viewer<\/a>\u00a0and the\u00a0web map<\/a>\u00a0are examples of how these map services can be used to aid interpretation, with the data broken up into Manager Type, Manager Name, Protection Status, and Public Access, for example.\r\n

Coordination and Collaboration<\/h2>\r\nPAD-US is first and foremost a product of collaboration and coordination, particularly at the federal, state, and NGO levels."},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":82142,"image_position":"left","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"For the past five years, USGS has cochaired (along with the US Census Bureau and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management) the Federal Lands Working Group (FLWG), an innovative partnership of 15 federal agencies that are defining data translation protocols for sharing all federal-level land management data directly into PAD-US. This has been a huge task. Tremendous progress was made for PAD-US 1.4, and momentum is building.\r\n\r\nThe state-level data stewards\u2014which include one or two governmental agencies, universities, and nonprofits per state, depending on each state's situation\u2014manage state and local data for PAD-US updates. Stewards range from departments of natural resources and natural heritage programs to universities like Colorado State University and nonprofits such as the GreenInfo Network. (A complete list of partners, plus more information about them, can be found\u00a0here<\/a>.)\r\n\r\nNongovernmental organizations also play key roles in PAD-US.\u00a0The Nature Conservancy<\/a>, for example, has helped develop inventories in many eastern states. The\u00a0National Conservation Easement Database<\/a>, which is led by the\u00a0Trust for Public Land<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Ducks Unlimited<\/a>, secures easement data from land trusts and agencies. And the\u00a0National Recreation and Parks Association<\/a>\u00a0promotes PAD-US-compatible data standards and tools for its thousands of agency members.\r\n

Coming Soon<\/h2>\r\nThanks to the considerable efforts of these data stewards and USGS, PAD-US version 2.0 will be released before the end of 2017. In addition to having extensive data updates for many state and federal lands, the second version of the geodatabase will have a new structure with separate feature classes for fee ownerships (e.g., national forest or state park), designation areas (such as wilderness, wild and scenic rivers, areas of critical environmental concern, and some state wildlife areas), easements, and marine protected areas. This structure will resolve a long-standing challenge with PAD-US in which fee-owned lands and designated areas have been in a single feature class with many overlaps, requiring extra data manipulation to conduct analysis."},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":82152,"image_position":"right","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"The new PAD-US structure will also help USGS publish tailored PAD-US data editions (for conservation, land planning, recreation, and more) out of the core dataset. Additionally, federal agencies are seeking to reduce the overlaps and slivers between agency datasets, which will boost the analytical capabilities of PAD-US.\r\n\r\nLater in 2018, the Trust for Public Land is scheduled to release its ParkServe GIS dataset, which will cover parks in all urban areas of the United States. This data will add tremendous coverage, bringing the full database much closer to realization. Work is also moving forward on many other technical improvements to PAD-US. These include resolving boundary gaps and overlaps, filling in data for some attributes, and improving the status ranks for biodiversity conservation.\r\n\r\nBy 2020, it is likely that PAD-US will be a complete inventory of public lands in the United States, incorporating all known sites and descriptive information. This will make continued maintenance by USGS and its state steward data partners much easier.\r\n

Join the Effort<\/h2>\r\nUsers are an indispensable part of the future of PAD-US. Here's how to get the most out of the dataset:\r\n