Ground conductivity measurements at selected National Wildlife Refuges, Montana and North Dakota, 2017-2018

Shallow subsurface electrical conductivity was mapped at selected U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service managed lands in northeast Montana and northwest North Dakota using the DUALEM421 electromagnetic sensor (Dualem, Inc., ON, Canada) in the winters of 2017 and 2018. Data were acquired by towing the DUALEM421 sensor on a sled behind an all-terrain vehicle or snow machine, with the sensor at a nominal height of 0.3 meters (m) above ground surface. Approximately 427 line-kilometers (km) of data were acquired over an area of nearly 26 square-kilometers. Data were manually edited to remove sensor dropouts, lag corrected for apparent offsets between recorded GPS location and data locations for each coil pair, and averaged to a sounding distance of 1m along the survey path; data were not decoupled from infrastructure noise sources (powerlines, pipelines, fences, etc.) or corrected for sensor pitch or roll. This data release contains raw and processed electromagnetic data. Digital data are described by the data dictionaries. Additional details regarding the processing steps are described in the metadata.