USA Historic Sites

The USGS Protected Areas Database of the United States (PAD-US) is a spatial database 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. The geodatabase maps and describes public lands and other conservation areas, including voluntarily provided private protected areas. Most areas are protected public lands owned in fee; however, long-term leases and agreements or administrative designations documented in agency management plans may be included. In addition, easements provided by the National Conservation Easement Database (NCED, http://conservationeasement.us ) and the National System of Marine Protected Areas (MPA, http://marineprotectedareas.noaa.gov ) tracked by NOAA are included. Federal and state data are generally complete, while local government and private protected area coverage depends on data management capacity in the state. See the PAD-US companion site (http://dev.protectedlands.net ) for maps of capacity and data completeness by state. Significant improvements to the local government theme are under way in partnership with the Trust for Public Land (TPL). The PAD-US geodatabase contains over twenty-five attributes and four feature classes to support data management, queries, web mapping services and analyses: Marine Protected Areas (MPA), Fee, Easements and Combined. The MPA and Easement feature classes contain some attributes unique to the sole source databases tracking them (e.g. Easement Holder Name from NCED, Protection Level from NOAA MPA Inventory). The "Combined" feature class integrates all fee, easement and MPA features as the best available national inventory of protected areas in the standard PAD-US framework. If desired, MPAs may be removed where "Designation Type" = 'Marine Protected Area' or easements selected where "Category" = 'Easement'. In addition to geographic boundaries, PAD-US describes the category (e.g. fee, easement, other), owner and managing agency, designation type, unit name, area, public access and state name in a suite of standardized fields. An informative set of references (i.e. Aggregator Source, GIS Source, GIS Source Date) and "local" or source data fields provide a transparent link to authoritative data sources. The areas in PAD-US are also assigned conservation measures that assess management intent to permanently protect biological diversity: the nationally relevant "GAP Status Code" and global "IUCN Category" standard. 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 ). See the PAD-US Data Standard at: http://gapanalysis.usgs.gov/padus/ or contact the PAD-US Coordinator for more information. As a full inventory of protected areas by name, aggregated from authoritative source data, PAD-US includes legitimately overlapping designation types (e.g. Wilderness Area over a Wild and Scenic River and National Forest) and sliver errors. Overlapping designations largely occur in the federal theme of the "fee" or "combined" feature classes and may be removed by a selection where "Category" = Designation (DESG). Major sliver errors have been identified and shared with agency data stewards for correction in source files over time. GAP conducts separate analyses to summarize area statistics for PAD-US attributes such as: Owner Name, Manager Name, GAP Status Code, IUCN Category, State Name. Contact the PAD-US Coordinator for more information before conducting area related analyses. PAD-US version 1.4 includes: 1) Complete federal lands theme update: BLM, FWS, NPS, USFS, BIA, DOD, NOAA, USACE and NRCS. USBR, TVA, DOE, ARS transferred from PAD-US 1.3 as best available nationally aggregated data. The federal lands update was developed in collaboration with the FGDC Federal Lands Working Group (http://www.