The USGS Gap Analysis Project (GAP) has announced the release of PAD-US 1.4 (PAD-US was officially published in May 2016, and announced in August 2016). The data set is available for download at the USGS GAP web site.
PAD-US 1.4 is a major update. The following are highlights of what’s new:
- Full update/replacement of federal lands, developed with the FGDC Federal Lands Working Group (https://cms.geoplatform.gov/a16govunits/FederalLands)
- Twenty PAD-US State Steward Network update submissions: AK, AL, AZ, CA, FL, GA, IN, KS, KY, MS, NE, NC, NV, OK, OR, SC, TX, UT, WA and WY, plus The Nature Conservancy (TNC) owned lands
- Conservation easements from the National Conservation Easement Database (NCED), suitable for distribution in the public domain
- Trust for Public Land (TPL) contribution of local gov areas in 13 states
- National Marine Protected Areas (MPA) from the NOAA MPA Center
- Conservation measures reviewed (“GAP Status Code”, “IUCN Category”)
- Additional standardized “Designation Type” categories
- New standardized “Manager Type” and “Manager Name” fields
- Additional “Date of Establishment” for trends analyses (field in development, mostly for federal lands now)
- “Public Access” codes reviewed by select PAD-US Stewards and federal partners (only partial coding at this point)
- Technical revisions to increase database performance
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