Description: The National Conservation Easement Database (NCED) is a collaborative venture to compile easement records (both spatial and tabular) from land trusts and public agencies throughout the United States in a single, up-to-date, sustainable, GIS compatible, online source. The goal of the NCED is to provide a comprehensive picture of the estimated 20 million acres of privately owned conservation easement lands, recognizing their contribution to America's natural heritage, a vibrant economy, and healthy communities. Conservation easements are legal agreements voluntarily entered into between landowners and conservation entities (agencies or land trusts) for the express purpose of protecting certain societal values such as open space or vital wildlife habitats. In some cases landowners transfer "development rights" for direct payment or for federal and state tax benefits.
Copyright Text: The NCED project partners would like to thank the U.S. Endowment for Forestry and Communities for their leadership and forethought for putting the NCED team together and for the initial funding that allowed the NCED to be formed. Additional support for the NCED project was provided by the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation and the Knobloch Family Foundation. We would also like to thank Greg Schildwachter for his leadership skills in guiding the project partners through this two-year journey. While the NCED partners were responsible for aggregating conservation easements from across the country, the NCED database would not have been successful without the cooperation of many federal, state, and local agencies, regional and state data repositories, and individual land trusts. We would like to thank the many state and federal agencies and local land trusts that took part in this endeavor. In addition, we would like to provide specific acknowledgement of the following organizations for their provision of state-wide, regional or national data: COMap - Colorado State University; Clemson University, David Holman - Greater Chicago area protected lands; Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission; Florida Natural Areas Inventory; GreenInfo - California Protected Areas Database; Kansas Natural Heritage Inventory; Kentucky Natural Heritage Program; Maine State Planning Office; Maryland Environmental Trust; Montana Natural Heritage Programs, University of Montana in partnership with the Montana State Library; Nebraska Natural Heritage Program, Nebraska Game and Parks Commission; The Nature Conservancy; Utah Conservation Data Center, State of Utah Natural Resources, Division of Wildlife Resources; Virginia Natural Heritage Program, Department of Conservation and Recreation; Natural Resources Conservation Service; U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; U.S. Forest Service.
Description: The USGS Protected Areas Database of the United States (PAD-US) is the nation's inventory of protected areas, including public land and voluntarily provided private protected areas, identified as an A-16 National Geospatial Data Asset in the Cadastre Theme (https://communities.geoplatform.gov/ngda-cadastre/). The PAD-US is an ongoing project with several published versions of a spatial database including areas dedicated to the preservation of biological diversity, and other natural (including extraction), recreational, or cultural uses, managed for these purposes through legal or other effective means. The database was originally designed to support biodiversity assessments; however, its scope expanded in recent years to include all public and nonprofit lands and waters. Most are public lands owned in fee; however, long-term easements, leases, agreements, Congressional (e.g. 'Wilderness Area'), Executive (e.g. 'National Monument'), and administrative designations (e.g. 'Area of Critical Environmental Concern') documented in agency management plans are also included. The PAD-US strives to be a complete inventory of public land and other protected areas, compiling “best available” data provided by managing agencies and organizations. The PAD-US geodatabase maps and describes areas with over twenty-five attributes in nine feature classes to support data management, queries, web mapping services, and analyses. This PAD-US Version 2.0 dataset includes a variety of updates and changes from the previous Version 1.4 dataset. The following list summarizes major updates and changes: 1) Expanded database structure with new layers: the geodatabase feature class structure now includes nine feature classes separating fee owned lands, conservation (and other) easements, management designations overlapping fee lands, marine areas, proclamation boundaries and various 'Combined' feature classes (e.g. 'Fee' + 'Easement' + 'Designation' feature classes); 2) Major update of the Federal estate including data from 8 agencies, developed in collaboration with the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) Federal Lands Working Group (FLWG, https://communities.geoplatform.gov/ngda-govunits/federal-lands-workgroup/); 3) Major updates to 30 States and limited additions to 16 other States; 4) Integration of The Nature Conservancy's (TNC) Secured Lands geodatabase; 5) Integration of Ducks Unlimited's (DU) Conservation and Recreation Lands (CARL) database; 6) Integration of The Trust for Public Land's (TPL) Conservation Almanac database; 7) The Nature Conservancy (TNC) Lands database update: the national source of lands owned in fee or managed by TNC; 8) National Conservation Easement Database (NCED) update: complete update of non-sensitive (suitable for publication in the public domain) easements; 9) Complete National Marine Protected Areas (MPA) update: from the NOAA MPA Inventory, including conservation measure ('GAP Status Code', 'IUCN Category') review by NOAA; 10) First integration of Bureau of Energy Ocean Management (BOEM) managed marine lands: BOEM submitted Outer Continental Shelf Area lands managed for natural resources (minerals, oil and gas), a significant and new addition to PAD-US; 11) Fee boundary overlap assessment: topology overlaps in the PAD-US 2.0 'Fee' feature class have been identified and are available for user and data-steward reference (See Logical_Consistency_Report Section). For more information regarding the PAD-US dataset please visit, https://usgs.gov/gapanalysis/PAD-US/. For more information about data aggregation please review the “Data Manual for PAD-US” available at https://www.usgs.gov/core-science-systems/science-analytics-and-synthesis/gap/pad-us-data-manual .
Copyright Text: U.S. Geological Survey, Gap Analysis Project (GAP), Sept. 2018, Protected Areas Database of the United States (PADUS), Version 2.0 Combined Feature Class