USGS PAD-US Data Explorer
Didn't know if this site had ever been posted.I just found it.Shows Public Land for the whole country.Would be nice if the overlay was see through.Maybe it is and I just haven't found it yet.
Nationwide Public Lands Interactive Map
- Thread starter manumuskin
- Start date
Didn't know if this site had ever been posted.I just found it.Shows Public Land for the whole country.Would be nice if the overlay was see through.Maybe it is and I just haven't found it yet.
That is interesting Al. It's a good starting point though, as it gives the ownership when clicked on (at least on the ones I clicked on, maybe only federal).
This one from the state is similar, and you can flip it to see the property borders.
newjersey.maps.arcgis.com
This one from the state is similar, and you can flip it to see the property borders.
ArcGIS Web Application
newjersey.maps.arcgis.com
Looks pretty good. However, it does appear to be incomplete in some areas - for example, lots of public land around the Mays Landing area is missing. Maybe I missed some menu setting? Didn't spend any time looking at other areas, so this might just be a fluke. My maps use the NJDEP openspace dataset.
https://boydsmaps.com/pines/#14/39.466809/-74.747820/lightstreets/0/0/
https://boydsmaps.com/pines/#14/39.466809/-74.747820/lightstreets/0/0/
I was looking for a nationwide map since I"m starting to look at relocation places when I retire and I want a place where theres lots of public land to keep me from the temptation of trespassing. Too old to run now and too old to fight so I"m trying to behave but I need a lot of woods to get into.
Got ya. But my point was, that site may not show all public openspace in any given area. Trying to understand the pattern in the screenshot above. The Great Egg Harbor River WMA is only partially shown on the US map, for example. Maybe new acquisitions and/or consolidation of smaller properties into an existing WMA? But I didn't look at all the options, maybe the map changes when you click All Managed Areas? Didn't try that.
Revisiting this thread since I'm currently working on larger versions of my maps that cover the whole Northeast US region. I need openspace data for all those states and it's a real run-around trying to find it on individual state websites. So, this looks like a very good option for getting all the data in one place. You can download the current Protected Area Database (PAD) here
www.usgs.gov
I downloaded the full US file, but it's absolutely huge and almost impossible to work with. After 30 minutes, my GIS program still hadn't loaded the whole thing, so I gave up. But you can download individual state versions here and they work well, so that's what I'm using.
www.sciencebase.gov
There's a lot of data here and I need to study more carefully, because not everything on these maps is actually *public* openspace. I think it also includes areas that *should* be protected in some way, so I will need to filter this kind of thing out before creating my maps. This is from the metadata:
"The PAD-US geodatabase was originally developed to organize and assess the management status of elements of biodiversity protection by identifying species and plant communities not adequately represented in existing conservation lands."
Here's an example of the attrbutes available from a portion of Wharton State Forest, for example
But this is also part of the database, and not someplace you can wander around.
Anyway, this may not be useful to anyone else, but thought I'd post here for future reference. The data is supplied as ArcGIS GDB files, so you would need software capable of opening those kinds of files to utilize these downloads.
PAD-US Data Download | U.S. Geological Survey
Download the Protected Areas Database (PAD-US) Data:Data are available for download in an ArcGIS Geodatabase format Nationally or by 56 State/Territory boundaries.
I downloaded the full US file, but it's absolutely huge and almost impossible to work with. After 30 minutes, my GIS program still hadn't loaded the whole thing, so I gave up. But you can download individual state versions here and they work well, so that's what I'm using.
PAD-US 4.0 State Downloads
In addition to the national download available in PAD-US 4.0, data is available by 56 State/Territory boundaries in GBD format. The U.S. Census Bureau is the national steward for legally defined geographic area boundaries for State and Equivalent areas. For more information about Census...
There's a lot of data here and I need to study more carefully, because not everything on these maps is actually *public* openspace. I think it also includes areas that *should* be protected in some way, so I will need to filter this kind of thing out before creating my maps. This is from the metadata:
"The PAD-US geodatabase was originally developed to organize and assess the management status of elements of biodiversity protection by identifying species and plant communities not adequately represented in existing conservation lands."
Here's an example of the attrbutes available from a portion of Wharton State Forest, for example
But this is also part of the database, and not someplace you can wander around.
Anyway, this may not be useful to anyone else, but thought I'd post here for future reference. The data is supplied as ArcGIS GDB files, so you would need software capable of opening those kinds of files to utilize these downloads.
Note: I deleted three off-topic posts about AC International Airport from this thread and put them into a new thread in the Land Use Issues forum here.
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I just randomly clicked on a couple properties to use as an example of what's in the database. I used examples from NJ just because they would be more familiar. But NJ already has very comprehensive openspace data, so you don't really need that database if you're only interested in the Pines.
As Al posted above, he's interested in this database for researching public openspace in other states. The point I was trying to make was that you need to be careful because not everything in the database is open to the public. There are 986,000 properties in the Northeast US portion of the database that I downloaded. Only 265,000 of those are specifically flagged as being open to the public. Aside from the ones that are marked as being closed to the public, there's a huge number that show "unknown" access rights. It will take a fair amount of research to determine their real status.
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I just randomly clicked on a couple properties to use as an example of what's in the database. I used examples from NJ just because they would be more familiar. But NJ already has very comprehensive openspace data, so you don't really need that database if you're only interested in the Pines.
As Al posted above, he's interested in this database for researching public openspace in other states. The point I was trying to make was that you need to be careful because not everything in the database is open to the public. There are 986,000 properties in the Northeast US portion of the database that I downloaded. Only 265,000 of those are specifically flagged as being open to the public. Aside from the ones that are marked as being closed to the public, there's a huge number that show "unknown" access rights. It will take a fair amount of research to determine their real status.
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Spent awhile digging through these. For the time being, I'm classifying 326,000 of the items in the Northeast US dataset as public openspace. So, that suggests about 2/3 of the properties in this dataset are not actually open to the general public.
If you just go to the link in the first post of this thread, the default is to show "protected areas" - I believe that means it shows everything in their database, includiing restricted and unknown access areas. If you click the "public access areas" tab, then there are a lot less areas shown on the map. That looks similar to my finding that almost two thirds of the properties in this dataset are not open to the public. However, a number of properties with "unknown access" are clearly open to the public when you look more closely at the data record. I have included those in my own dataset, but these would not be shown when you click the "public access areas" tab on the website.