Land use and disturbance history for Badlands National Park, South Dakota through March 2018

This spatial data set provides information pertaining to the known land use and disturbance history for lands within the March 2018 administrative boundary of the North Unit of Badlands National Park, South Dakota. Land use and disturbance history presented here are not a comprehensive record of all potential land uses and disturbances but rather a record of known and documented land uses and disturbances based on the best available information. Additional land use and disturbance information may exist but due to time and budget constraints may not have been discovered during the research and development of this data set. The information in this data set was gathered through a variety of sources including but not limited to communication with National Park Service staff, historical documents, land patent records, online information searches, aerial imagery, historical photographs, and spatial data repositories. Data are presented as polygon features, each with a unique area number, its total area (in acres) and the percent of the park the area covers. Polygons were delineated based on existing GIS layers in park records, or, when these were not available, they were digitized using ESRI Arc Map 10.5.1 in conjunction with USDA Natural Resource Conservation Service NAIP orthoimagery based on written descriptions of locations (e.g., Township and Range Survey System) or maps in information sources. History of each polygon is described for one or more of five land use or disturbance types: cultivation, structures, excavation, grazing, and other disturbance. Each land use or disturbance type has six attribute fields. The first field indicates if there is evidence of the land use or disturbance type in the polygon. "Yes" indicates there is evidence and a &lt;null&gt; value indicates evidence was not found. A &lt;null&gt; value does not guarantee that the land use or disturbance type has not occurred in the area, but rather that we found no evidence of that type. The second field provides a description of the land use or disturbance event or activities. The level of detail provided in the description is based on the best available information. The third field provides the last known date of land use or disturbance or the best estimation of the last known date; for grazing, the range of time over which grazing was documented is indicated. The fourth field provides an explanation of how the land use or disturbance date was generated or the confidence level of the date. The fifth field provides an explanation of the confidence in the area boundary. The spatial accuracy of area boundaries are only as good as the available information they were generated from and should be used with the understanding that they may be overestimated, underestimated, or misaligned. In some cases the area was generated from personal recollection of a park service staff and exact location is unknown. The sixth and last field provides the references used to populate the first five fields.

Tags: agricultural-sites, farming, grasslands, jackson-county, maps-and-atlases, parks, pennington-county, south-dakota, structure, transportation, usgs-5bbfc544e4b0fc368eb536a6
Organization: Department of the Interior