In the business of managing public lands, the Bureau of Land Management collects and utilizes a great deal of information related to or describing a piece of land and the resources on and under it. Data might be information about bird nesting sites or wild horse herd use areas. It might be legal land survey information or legal descriptions of land parcels. The common thread is that this information is tied to the land. A GIS is a computer system capable of storing, analyzing, and displaying data describing places on the earth's surface.
Analyses can be quite simple or very complex.
The BLM clearinghouse is designed to give the user maximum flexibility in how they query the data. A number of pre-set keyword queries are on the main clearinghouse page. These are divided into theme keywords and place keywords. Clicking on any of these keywords will query the geospatial metadata and return any layer that contains the selected keyword. A brief description of each returned layer is given and clicking on the layer title will take you to the metadata for that layer.