Terrestrial Conservation Estate of the United States

Jan 28, 2013 (Last modified Feb 4, 2013)
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Visualizing fee simple lands and easements together to represent the protected landscape in the US.

The terrestrial conservation estate of the United States is a complex network of fee lands (lands owned and dedicated to the preservation of biological diversity and other natural, recreation and cultural uses - managed for these purposes through legal or other effective means) and easements (lands under a voluntary restriction agreement between landowners and land trusts or other public agencies).  These data are critical to a better understanding of protected land ownership and management of natural, recreation and cultural resources across the country.  It is now possible to visualize and download these data as a single zipped file, which includes:

The attribute information for fee lands and easements are specific and unique to their protection mechanism type and are therefore best represented as two separate thematic layers.  The PAD-US (CBI Edition) product was recently redesigned to focus attribute information about fee lands ownership, management and protection. All easements included in previous version were transferred to NCED along with thousands of newly acquired spatial and tabular information.

Together these products provide the most current and complete data on protected areas in the United States. The PAD-US (CBI Edition) team and the National Conservation Easement Database (NCED) partners worked collaboratively to developed these two unique products that could be used together better characterize the land and water protection across the country.

Recommended by Brendan Ward
Tags
fee simple lands, easments, protected areas
Citation
Kai Henifin. 2013. Terrestrial Conservation Estate of the United States. In: Data Basin. [First published in Data Basin on Jan 28, 2013; Last Modified on Feb 4, 2013; Retrieved on Dec 26, 2024] <https://databasin.org/articles/68ca54890bda434cb9c208d93d20c8f0/>

About the Author

Kai Henifin
Climate and Fire Resilience Coordinator with Pepperwood

I am a Project Manager and Senior GIS Specialist with more than a decade of experience working with diverse stakeholder groups to co-produce high quality science information that is accessible to a wide range of people, both technical and non-technical. I have an expertise in developing, managing...