The Data Basin Protected Areas Center (PAC) is a centralized location for critical spatial data on the status of global land and water protection. The PAC is a forum that allows users to explore, share and download resources on protected areas.
The PAC was built to address the need for a centralized web-location to publish and disseminate critical protected areas data in concert with mapping and analysis tools. All published datasets within the system are required to have supporting metadata documentation that includes detailed information about the data, so that others can easily use and understand the information. The social network style environment gives our users unique opportunities to work in collaboration to address the worlds pressing environmental issues.
Protected Areas data on the PAC are characterized into two sections, US protected areas and global protected areas.
The three types of U.S. protected areas (fee lands, conservation restriction/easement, marine) are represented as individual databases:
Conservation planners, resources managers, academics, researchers and individuals interested in protected areas information are using the PAC to address important conservation and resource related issues (e.g., mapping, planning, analyses, and problem-solving) pertaining to climate change adaptation, green energy development, infrastructure planning, and wildlife connectivity.
PAC contributors come from institutions, universities, research groups and individuals. PAC data contributors provide high quality datasets as they become available. We require contributors to add metadata to the uploaded datasets to ensure that they are easily understood and cited. Contact Kai Henifin (khenifin@consbio.org) to contribute datasets.
Public datasets with the PAC can be downloaded from the Data Basin platform as a .zip (Zip archives are collections of files which an be used on all major platforms) or .lpk (A layer package includes all data and information related to an ArcGIS layer) directly to a local computer. Users who download data from the Data Basin PAC must abide by the Data Basin Terms of Use and any use constraints identified by the original data creator, see file metadata from this information.