A Boise State team led by John Freemuth, and funded by a USGS grant, helped create a new tool mapping public lands and other protected areas in the U.S. The Protected Areas Database of the United States contains more than 3 billion public land and marine acres managed by nearly 15,100 agencies and nongovernmental organizations, covering 200,000 separate parks and protected areas.
The project has been used for:
· Land ownership questions by congressional district, including federal, state, and local governments
· Federal land ownership on or near the U.S. borders
· Agency-specific lands in state or congressional district
· Boundaries of specific units (i.e., parks, monuments, etc.)
· Identifying military installations by name in conjunction with government reports
· Locating federal facilities in U.S. territories