The Protected Areas Database of the United States (PAD-US) is a national geodatabase, created by USGS GAP, that represents public land ownership and conservation lands, including voluntarily provided privately protected areas, for the continental United States, Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Pacific and US Virgin Islands. The lands included in PAD-US are assigned conservation status codes that both denote the level of biodiversity preservation and indicate other natural, recreational and cultural uses.
The most recent version of PAD-US is 1.2, published in April 2011.
- Explore this data set with GAP’s online PAD-US viewer >>
- Choose data options and download the PAD-US data set >>
- More information is available about the PAD-US data >>
- Learn more about the PAD-US 1.2 update >>
PAD-US Data Features
The PAD-US version 1.2 data set is available as a zipped geodatabase or shapefile format and includes:
- Geographic boundaries of public land ownership (primarily federal and state, local government data is incorporated with increasing frequency) and voluntarily provided private conservation lands (e.g., Nature Conservancy Preserves or land trust easements) from authoritative data sources;
- 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;
- GAP Status Codes, a conservation measure of each parcel based on protection level categories that provide a measure of management intent for the long-term protection of biodiversity.
- IUCN categories, a globally inter operable conservation measure required for a protected area’s inclusion into UNEP-World Conservation Monitoring Centre’s (WCMC) World Database for Protected Areas (WDPA)
PAD-US Release History
Learn about earlier versions of the database.
Data Standards
Download the “Standards and Methods Manual for State Data Stewards” (1 mb pdf)
Download “Recommendations Report from the PAD-US Design Project, July 2009”
(A Map for the Future) (1.2 mb pdf)