USGS PAD-US — Protected Areas Database of the United States
USGS's inventory of protected lands — parks, forests, wilderness, conservation easements. Powers UFFDA's field and area overlap screen.
What this is
PAD-US is USGS's inventory of US protected areas — federal, state, local, private, tribal, and marine. It is the US national contribution to the WDPA (World Database on Protected Areas) and covers all categories of protected lands. UFFDA uses PAD-US for two things: a map overlay showing where protected lands are, and an overlap check — does a field intersect a protected area?
Why we surface it
PAD-US feeds the WDPA and is fully open, while the global WDPA itself, via Protected Planet, is non-commercial only. Knowing that nothing in PAD-US touches your field is worth as much as seeing the overlay. USGS says it isn't built to settle what is or isn't on an exact parcel, so read a clean result as a first screen, not the final word.
What you can do with it
Shown for commercial use. Personal, research, and nonprofit use is often more permissive — switch the verdict lens on the catalog.
- Internal / individual use
- Public domain. Use it for anything — internal, resale, AI training, closed products. No attribution legally required (crediting the source is still the decent thing to do).
- Redistribute the data
- Public domain. Use it for anything — internal, resale, AI training, closed products. No attribution legally required (crediting the source is still the decent thing to do).
- Republish a derivative
- Public domain. Use it for anything — internal, resale, AI training, closed products. No attribution legally required (crediting the source is still the decent thing to do).
- Build into a private product
- Public domain. Use it for anything — internal, resale, AI training, closed products. No attribution legally required (crediting the source is still the decent thing to do).
This decoder is a starting point, not legal advice. For commercial deployment, run the actual license terms past someone who reads them for a living.
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