The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is responsible for cadastral survey, land and mineral use authorization, 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. To meet these goals, the BLM is providing the public with mapping capabilities to our land and minerals use authorization and mining claim record data.
Where does the data come from?
GeoCommunicator is the publication web site for the BLM’s National Integrated Land System (NILS). GeoCommunicator provides the public and the BLM searching, accessing, and dynamic mapping of data for federal land stewardship, land & mineral records and land survey information.
The data for this application comes from the BLM's National Integrated Land System (NILS), the BLM's Legacy Rehost 2000 (LR2000) (www.blm.gov/lr2000), the Range Authorization System, the Abandoned Mines System, the Facility Asset Management System, and from other data sources.
NILS is a joint development project between the BLM and U.S. Forest Service (USFS) conducted in partnership with states, counties, and private industry to provide a comprehensive solution to integrate survey data with parcel-based land records in an enterprise GIS environment. As part of the BLM’s E-Government efforts and with the development of NILS, spatially displaying parcel data from many of the BLM’s computer applications has become a reality.
NILS consists of two environments: 1) a transactional side, in which cadastral data and land records data are captured, analyzed, edited, and committed to permanent records, and 2) a publication side, GeoCommunicator.
The BLM's Legacy Rehost 2000 is a text-based case recordation system for processing and recording information on BLM's land and mineral authorizations such as leases, permits, contracts, grants, agreements, land/mineral patents, and other use authorizations issued by the BLM for the U.S. excluding Alaska. The LR2000 system also includes unpatented mining claim records, land title records, withdrawals and classifications. Use authorizations are issued to the public for commodities and uses such as oil and gas, coal, sand, gravel, grazing, communication sites, and roads.
The land and mineral record information from the BLM's LR2000 System is being processed in NILS where the geometry for the land records is automatically being generated and stored with attribute data in the NILS geodatabase for spatial display and query. The NILS data is then exported weekly into the GeoCommunicator publication geodatabase for distribution, display, and query by the public. Not all the cases from LR2000 are available in GeoCommunicator.
Overview of LR2000 Systems
The BLM's LR2000 Case Recordation System contains current and historical information on use authorizations issued by the BLM on federal actions affecting public lands of the United States. Information on the use authorization includes customer data, location, date of issuance, the actions that have taken place, and other applicable information.
The LR2000 system contains the following subsystems:
Case Recordation contains current and historical information on leases, permits, contracts, grants, agreements, land/mineral patents, etc. issued by the BLM on federal actions affecting public lands of the United States. Authorizations are issued for the following activities: oil and gas, coal and other minerals, sand, gravel, rights-of-ways, land exchanges and acquisitions, land use withdrawals, mineral patents, land classifications, land claims, land sales, etc. Information on the use authorization includes customer data, location, date of issuance, the actions that have taken place, and other applicable information. Data concerning all land and mineral use cases on GeoCommunicator except for mining claims come from the Case Recordation system.
Mining Claim Recordation contains information on unpatented mining claims located on federal lands including claimant name, approximate location, and other applicable information. Mineral patents are not contained in Mining Claim Recordation. Mining claims data on GeoCommunicator comes from the Mining Claim Recordation system.
Status System was a project to collection all of the title transfer documents and land withdrawals and classifications into a computerized system. The system contains historical records until the early 1990s. Some examples of data contained within the Status system are:
- Land Classifications for Recreation & Public Purpose, power sites, etc.
- Land Withdrawals for the National Forest, National Park Service (NPS), National Monuments, reclamation and other uses.
- Land Title Transfer for homesteads, sales, exchanges, mineral entry patents, etc.
What Are Cases That Affect Land Status or CASES?
Cases That Affect Land Status is a set of records displayed in GeoCommunicator from the LR2000 Status system that affect the land ownership and status. They include such things as land grants, land exchanges, land withdrawals, mineral patents, land disposals, etc. This data is displayed in all map viewers. The Federal Surface Management Agency layer that is displayed in all of the map viewers in GeoCommunicator displays what federal agency is managing the surface of the land and is not consider land status. BLM State Offices offer Master Title Plats and Historical Index for more information.
Some cases can't be displayed
Not all cases from our LR2000 system can be displayed in GeoCommunicator for the following reasons:
- We don't have a land description in NILS to display the case. We use the land descriptions in NILS to automatically create the geometry for the case based on the case land description.
- The land description on the case is complex, missing, or bad.
- We haven't written conversion specifications for the land survey type yet.
Note: In some cases only a portion of the land for a case can be automatically generated. In these situations, not all land is displayed and a flag is set to note that the case has only a partial geometry. For more information read the data disclaimer:
For access to all BLM case data use the LR2000 system.
Help:
For more information on the National Integrated Land System (NILS), please visit our NILS Website.