David Spildie - Leopold Institute
History of Wilderness GIS boundaries
NWPS areas are created on lands administered by the four federal land management agencies: the Bureau of Land Management, US Fish and Wildlife Service, US Forest Service, and National Park Service.
Initially, the boundaries of these areas are manuscripted on paper and stable-base maps. Boundary mapping is usually under the purview of the Lands or Realty Offices in the respective Wilderness management agencies. It is incumbent on them to develop and distribute the final Maps of Record. Compilation of the final Map of Record is a lengthy process and often took years to complete. This also affected the ability of users to obtain updated copies of the maps for inventory, monitoring, and analysis purposes.
With the advent of computer mapping and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), these processes have been streamlined and can provide users with reliable and efficient methods for compiling, mapping, and analyzing geographic data. The mapping agency of the federal government, the USGS, has developed Wilderness boundaries as a standard small-scale digital layer within their Federal and Indian Lands administrative boundaries. These are also available in various formats through a number of their digital data programs. The goal of this project was to compile and maintain current digital boundaries of the NWPS and provide them as an easily accessible, standardized GIS product for analysis and display purposes. This has been accomplished by serving the NWPS boundaries on the USGS National Atlas website.
Compilation of Wilderness GIS boundaries at the Leopold Institute
It was clear at the inception of this project in the mid 1990s, that very little standardized digital data were available for the boundaries of the entire NWPS. Compounding this is the fact that proclaimed Wilderness in the United States is administered by four different agencies. Each agency has a unique mission for land management, and therefore, different priorities for the compilation of boundary information. Additionally, each agency uses different computing and database structures, which complicates the compilation of data into a central database.
At the start of the project, the most complete existing digital boundary coverage that included the Wilderness areas was the Managed Areas Database, housed at the University of California - Santa Barbara. A number of limitations to this dataset; lack of maintenance, outdated information, and proprietary rites, precluded its use as a source for Wilderness boundaries.
In 1998, Dave Spildie began a program to acquire and compile the NWPS digital boundaries. The goal was to provide current boundary information, at the largest scale available, with standardized attribution and metadata. Key to this program was maintenance and stewardship of the existing information as well as obtaining data for newly proclaimed areas. Oversight of the Wilderness legislative process and tracking the creation of new areas was crucial to providing current information.
Development of Wilderness GIS boundaries with the National Atlas Program
The original digital database for the Wilderness coverage was the USGS Federal and Indian Lands layer. This is a digital compilation of all Federal and Indian tribal land boundaries, at different source scales, from the USGS National Atlas project. New Wildernesses, and additions to existing Wilderness, were acquired by Steve Kambly of the USGS and Dave Spildie of ALWRI. A cooperative agreement was established in 2000 for Dave Spildie to contact the administrative agency for each new Wilderness to acquire the necessary digital Wilderness boundaries and metadata. Those data were checked for content and attribution and then passed on to Steve Kambly for incorporation into the Wilderness GIS database.
Maintenance and stewardship of the Wilderness GIS boundaries
Maintenance of the Wilderness GIS boundaries is accomplished through the cooperative agreement between ALWRI and the USGS National Atlas program. The ALWRI GIS coordinator is responsible for ensuring stewardship of these digital data. As new Wildernesses and Wilderness additions become law, the digital data are acquired by ALWRI staff from the managing agencies. These data are checked for polygon structure, attribution, metadata, and then forwarded to the USGS. It is the responsibility of the USGS National Atlas program to incorporate these changes into the GIS database. Issues with adjustments to the final Wilderness boundaries may affect development, capture, and acquisition of the GIS data and delay its addition to the database.
- References
Landres, Peter and Meyer, Shannon, 2000. National Wilderness Preservation System Database:
- Key Attributes and Trends, 1964 Through 1999. Gen. Tech. Rep. INT-GTR-18-Revised Edition, Ogden, UT: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Rocky Mountain Research Station, 98 p.
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