Best Practices
While there is no one best way of tracking protected areas, there are some leading approaches that can effectively inform inventory strategies. This page has general resources that can help you and will be updated as the PAD-US project progresses and new information becomes available.
Current National Inventories
The PAD-US is the national protected area data inventory for the United States. Released at version 1.0 in April 2009, the data set is now being updated for a version 1.1 release in later 2009, through work of the USGS Gap Analysis Program and the Conservation Biology Institute.
Prior national inventories included the CBI Protected Areas Database (PAD) and the USGS GAP Stewardship Layer.
Global Inventory
The World Conservation Monitoring Center (WCMC) maintains the World Database on Protected Areas (WPDA). WPDA is built by integrating authoritative national data from each country into a common data framework. Information on their techniques and an online web mapper for the data can be found at the WPDA web site. More general information on protected areas can be found at the WCMC web site, including information about conservation ranking codes published by the IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature).
State Inventories
For more information, visit our Find Data section (where you can also add your own information about state inventories). Here are some selected state resources from states that have very complete inventories - we expect to add to these over time:
California - The California Protected Areas Database (CPAD) has its own website with download information, a web map browser and extensive documentation about the data, including sample maps. CPAD covers 48 million acres owned by 800 agencies (mapped mostly from tax parcels), and is published by GreenInfo Network.
Colorado - COMaP (Colorado Ownership Management and Protection) is the state's inventory program, which is housed at Colorado State University's Natural Resource Ecology Lab. The most recent version was published in late 2008 and includes substantial local government and NGO holdings, in addition to state and federal lands. A detailed version of the data set is available to selected users, and a public web map portal from the Co. Division of Wildlife is also available.
Great Lakes region - CARL is maintained by Ducks Unlimited as a regional data set for several Great Lakes states, complete with online browser.
Massachusetts - The state's Protected and Recreational Open Space Data Layer is a comprehensive, parcel based system published by MassGIS, the state agency responsible for GIS. The data web site has rich information on the data set and you can subscribe to a very informative newsletter.
Montana - Easement data (along with all other protected lands information) is fully available in this state, where public data access to it is required by law. The state's Land Stewardship data center has many good resources, along with download links.
Virginia - The Virginia Dept. of Conservation and Recreation maintains the state's Conservation Lands Database, which includes protected areas data for federal, state and regional agencies and organizations, and also includes significant easement holdings.