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Protected Areas Database of the United States (PAD-US) 4.0 Raster Analysis

Metadata Updated: November 25, 2025

Spatial analysis and statistical summaries of the Protected Areas Database of the United States (PAD-US) provide land managers and decision makers with a general assessment of management intent for biodiversity protection, natural resource management, and recreation access across the nation. The PAD-US 4.0 Combined Fee, Designation, Easement feature class in the full geodatabase inventory (with Military Lands and Tribal Areas from the Proclamation and Other Planning Boundaries feature class) was modified to prioritize overlapping designations, avoiding massive overestimation in protected area statistics, and simplified by the following PAD-US attributes to support user needs for raster analysis data: Manager Type, Manager Name, Designation Type, GAP Status Code, Public Access, and State Name. The rasterization process prioritized overlapping designations previously identified (GAP_Prity field) in the Vector Analysis file (e.g. Wilderness within a National Forest) based upon their relative biodiversity conservation (e.g. GAP Status Code 1 over 2).The 30-meter Image (IMG) grid Raster Analysis Files area extents were defined by the Census state boundary file used to clip the Vector Analysis File, the data source for rasterization ("PADUS4_0VectorAnalysis_State_Clip_CENSUS2022") feature class from ("PADUS4_0VectorAnalysisFile_OtherExtents_ClipCENSUS2022.gdb"). Alaska (AK) and Hawaii (HI) raster data are separated from the contiguous U.S. (CONUS) to facilitate analyses at manageable scales. Note, the PAD-US inventory is now considered functionally complete with the vast majority of land protection types (with a legal protection mechanism) represented in some manner, while work continues to maintain updates, improve data quality, and integrate new data as it becomes available (see inventory completeness estimates at: http://www.protectedlands.net/data-stewards/ ). In addition, protection status represents a point-in-time and changes in status between versions of PAD-US may be attributed to improving the completeness and accuracy of the spatial data more than actual management actions or new acquisitions. USGS provides no legal warranty for the use of this data. While PAD-US is the official aggregation of protected areas ( https://ngda-portfolio-community-geoplatform.hub.arcgis.com/pages/portfolio ), agencies are the best source of their lands data.

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: No license information was provided. If this work was prepared by an officer or employee of the United States government as part of that person's official duties it is considered a U.S. Government Work.

Downloads & Resources

Dates

Metadata Created Date September 12, 2025
Metadata Updated Date November 25, 2025

Metadata Source

Harvested from DOI USGS DCAT-US

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date September 12, 2025
Metadata Updated Date November 25, 2025
Publisher U.S. Geological Survey
Maintainer
Identifier http://datainventory.doi.gov/id/dataset/usgs-652d4e1cd34e44db0e2ee455
Data Last Modified 2024-04-25T00:00:00Z
Category geospatial
Public Access Level public
Bureau Code 010:12
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Metadata Catalog ID https://ddi.doi.gov/usgs-data.json
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Harvest Object Id b58200c5-e01a-4c1c-89e7-4e6ed9e66184
Harvest Source Id 2b80d118-ab3a-48ba-bd93-996bbacefac2
Harvest Source Title DOI USGS DCAT-US
Metadata Type geospatial
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash 2ef1fd3a4c111c401291affadb5a47ae3f592110ee10b19a99b985f462de81ad
Source Schema Version 1.1

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