Bureau of Land Management in Partnership with the U.S. Forest Service


About Federal Land Stewardship

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is responsible for cadastral survey, land and mineral use authorization, land and mineral title, and resource management of the public lands. In support of the development of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure, the BLM was given the lead by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB Circular A-16) for Public Land Conveyance, Federal Land Ownership Status, and Cadastral Survey. The Federal Land Stewardship application is the beginning of our goal to provide the public with access to land status data. Land Status is a method of classifying land to determine what rights have or have not been allocated. Each category of land status is derived by searching for events on the land that were conducted under authorities affecting the category of land status being derived, then accumulating the effect of the actions.

The Federal Land Stewardship website is an Internet application to search, locate, and display the federal land management boundaries and land status for public lands in the United States. The viewer can be used to graphically or textually locate the federal land of interest. Users can select by township and range, latitude and longitude, federal land name (BLM district, Forest Service Region), or by drawing a box on the map. The results of the search will display the selected area with symbolized boundaries that indicate the federal surface management agencies responsible for the federal lands. Contact information is provided for each parcel.

Federal Land Stewardship also provides a "map service" for the surface management layers. This allows users to view or "stream" live data directly to their desktop for use in GIS applications. The Federal Surface Management Agency layer can be incorporated into other map layers, data from the Internet, or onto a local computer using GIS applications. Information on the map services can be found in the reference section.

Surface Management Agency Map Layers as displayed in the Land Status Map Viewer

Boundaries

The Boundaries layer contains reference layers such as state, counties, forests, etc.

Regulated Uses (U.S. Forest Service)

This data layer contains information from the U.S. Forest Service for Region 4 on regulated uses, easements, wilderness, wild scenic rivers, right restrictions, mineral uses, etc. Regulated uses on the lands are controlled by the designation of the lands as described below:

  • Administratively Designated Areas
  • Congressionally Designated Areas
  • Developed Areas
  • Withdrawal Areas

CASES Data

This data layer contains the land and mineral title cases, withdrawals, and classifications from the BLM and U.S. Forest Service. This data comes from NILS and the BLM LR2000 systems: Status and Case Recordation. There are two data layers provided by the USFS Region 4 titled: USFS Ownership Parcels and USFS Separated Rights.

Subsurface Mineral Estate

This layer is a static data layer for Wyoming and New Mexico only, The data was supplied to NILS by the BLM WY and NM state offices.

Surface Management Agency Data Layer:

Data for the Surface Management Agency comes from the BLM's National Integrated Land System (NILS) supplied by BLM, the U.S. Forest Service, the National Park Service, and other federal agencies. Most of the data on the Surface Management Agency layer are at a scale of 1:100,000 or better. Other Federal lands are shown at a scale of 1:2,000,000, as reported by the U.S. Geological Survey's National Atlas. Subsurface ownership is not being displayed on the Surface Management Agency layer.

The data represents the "best available" seamless source of the federal surface management agency boundaries. The most current data sets are acquired from the state or regional offices of the BLM, USFS, NPS, and other federal agencies. The data are processed into the NILS system to form a national seamless dataset. Data for the Eastern U.S. comes from the U.S. Geological Survey's National Atlas. Much of the BLM data has been snapped to the Public Land Survey System (township, range, and section) making it more accurate than previous versions of the data layers. Data is being maintain through the NILS system

Process for the Surface Management Agency Data

For each data source (BLM, USFS, NPS, etc.) the following processing steps are implemented:

  • download source layer
  • import metadata
  • standardize layer name, attributes, projection
  • append modified source layer to SMA layer

SMA attributes

  • LOAD_ID
    Links to a table containing data loads details (metadata of source)
  • ARCHIVE_ID
    Flag indicates replaced data. Same as LOAD_ID for data which replaced it. Value will be "0" for active data.
  • MOD_DATE
    Provides a quick way to identify new data
  • ADM_CODE
    Agency of Surface Administration
  • NAME_DET
    Supplemental identification details (forest/park name, BLM district, etc.


The National BLM boundary data layers include:

  • BLM administrative land ownership
  • BLM National Monuments
  • BLM National Conservation Areas (wild and scenic rivers, scenic trails, historic trails)
  • BLM Wilderness Areas
  • BLM Wilderness Study Areas

Links

BLM manual for mapping sciences
http://www.blm.gov/nhp/efoia/wo/manual/9160.html

Federal Map standards for color
http://www.blm.gov/nstc/mapstandards/downloads/mapcolor.pdf