BLM REA NWP 2011 PADUS1 1

The Protected Areas Database of the United States (PAD-US) is a geodatabase, hosted by the USGS Gap Analysis Program (GAP), that illustrates and describes public land ownership, management and conservation lands nationally, including voluntarily provided privately protected areas. The lands included in PAD-US are assigned conservation measures that describe the level of management intent for the preservation of biological diversity and indicate other natural, recreational and cultural uses managed through legal or other effective means. GAP seeks to provide land managers, policy makers and the conservation community with pertainent information to make informed decisions regarding priority areas for conservation. The geodatabase includes: 1) Geographic boundaries of public land ownership and voluntarily provided private conservation lands (e.g., Nature Conservancy Preserves or Land Trust Easements) as provided by authoritative data sources (with duplicates removed); 2) Standardized and original land owner, land manager, management designation and parcel name descriptions, areas and the source of geographic information of each mapped land unit 3) GAP Status Codes of each parcel based on GAP protection level categories which are intended to provide a measurement of management commitment for long-term biodiversity conservation derived from land management plans or manager interviews 4) IUCN category for a protected area's inclusion into UNEP-World Conservation Monitoring Centre's World Database for Protected Areas. IUCN protected areas are defined as, "A clearly defined geographical space, recognized, dedicated and managed, through legal or other effective means, to achieve the long-term conservation of nature with associated ecosystem services and cultural values" and are categorized following a classification scheme available through USGS GAP; 5) World Database of Protected Areas (WDPA) Site Codes linking the multiple parcels of a single protected area in PAD-US for global analyses.