---
license: pddl
---



# United States Protected Areas Database

> U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Gap Analysis Project (GAP), 2022, Protected Areas Database of the United States (PAD-US) 3.0: U.S. Geological Survey data release, https://doi.org/10.5066/P9Q9LQ4B.


The PAD database classifications are complex and include overlapping and apparently duplicate polygons. For instance, national park boundaries can be found are listed in Proclamation feature class and also in Fee class (showing internal holes within boundaries). The processed PAD data layers here have been subset to the continental US (matching availability in MOBI data), and restricted to feature classes of "Fee" and "Easements", except for tribal boundaries which are taken from the "Proclamations."  See [ProtectedLands.net](https://www.protectedlands.net/pad-us-data-structure-attributes/) for a more detailed discussion of the data structure and classification involved in PAD.  Code for reproducing this processing can be found at [https://github.com/boettiger-lab/pad-us-3](https://github.com/boettiger-lab/pad-us-3)

USGS PAD-v3 is distributed as an ESRI Geodatabase.  After subsetting the data and labelling according to the additional classification listed above based
on manager type indicated in the data, core attributes are serialized into [PMTiles](https://docs.protomaps.com/pmtiles/) and [Geoparquet](https://geoparquet.org/)
formats hosted on [source.coop](https://beta.source.coop/repositories/cboettig/pad-us-3/description/).  PMTiles allows for rapid rendering of vector objects
at the appropriate zoom level in an interactive map from remote servers.  Geoparquet provides a high-performance serialization that can be efficiently queried directly from
remote https addresses without download using software such as [duckdb](https://duckdb.org), widely available in python, R, and other languages.


## Contents Overview

- `PADUS3` contains files extracted from the orginal zip archive and associated geodatabase distributed by the USGS.
- `pad-us3-combined.parquet` contains a geoparquet version of the geodatabase protected areas layer
- `pad-us3-combined.fgb` contains a FlatGeobuff version of the geodatabase protected areas layer


PMTiles are computed with GDAL 3.8.4 up to max zoom 10 as follows:

```
ogr2ogr -dsco MAX_SIZE=90000000 -dsco MAX_FEATURES=50000000 -dsco MAXZOOM=10 public.pmtiles public_protected.fgb
```

## Examples


Examples are generated with the `map.py` script.

[Dark map - full page](https://data.source.coop/cboettig/pad-us-3/protected-areas-dark.html)