Section Corner Lat/lons In Public Domain?

[planewood]

Anyone found an online source for lat/lons of section corners? Or even township corners?

[+blindleader]

It seems unlikely that such a public database will exist in the forseeable future. Section monuments are not part of any geodetic scheme, so the only people who are collecting geodetic data on them are local land surveyors. Surveyors are notoriously jealous of all data they collect in the field.

 

Still, some county or state governments might be trying to create these databases

[+Timpat]

Anyone found an online source for lat/lons of section corners? Or even township corners?

Hi Planewood, I believe I found what you are looking for. I just downloaded an entire County (Natrona, in central Wyoming) worth of this info where I used to live and am familiar with. It is in GIS shapefile format and has everything you could possibly want, including the Lat/Lon NAD83 points for every 1/16 section (1/4 of a 1/4 section). Yes, a point at every corner of each 40 acre parcel. For my county there are 121,494 corners! Wyoming has 23 counties.

 

Check out this link for the Land Survey Info System (LSIS). This data was compiled by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) cadastral survey program. If you have the ability to use a shapefile you are golden. If you have a specifc area you're interested in perhaps I could help create a more user friendly .gpx file for you? Good luck.

[planewood]

Anyone found an online source for lat/lons of section corners? Or even township corners?

Hi Planewood, I believe I found what you are looking for. I just downloaded an entire County (Natrona, in central Wyoming) worth of this info where I used to live and am familiar with. It is in GIS shapefile format and has everything you could possibly want, including the Lat/Lon NAD83 points for every 1/16 section (1/4 of a 1/4 section). Yes, a point at every corner of each 40 acre parcel. For my county there are 121,494 corners! Wyoming has 23 counties.

 

Check out this link for the Land Survey Info System (LSIS). This data was compiled by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) cadastral survey program. If you have the ability to use a shapefile you are golden. If you have a specifc area you're interested in perhaps I could help create a more user friendly .gpx file for you? Good luck.

 

Timpat -

 

I checked out that web site. Interesting, but nothing available for NE Oklahoma. Took me a long time to figure out how to download stuff for one of the western states. Then it was just a bunch of 'gooble-gook' binary files! Are there any free programs around that will extract coords with descriptions from a shapefile?

 

Also, in the zip file that you get from that site, which shape file do you know to use?

[+Timpat]

Timpat -

 

I checked out that web site. Interesting, but nothing available for NE Oklahoma. Took me a long time to figure out how to download stuff for one of the western states. Then it was just a bunch of 'gooble-gook' binary files! Are there any free programs around that will extract coords with descriptions from a shapefile?

 

Also, in the zip file that you get from that site, which shape file do you know to use?

Yes. Firstly you can take the .dbf file portion of each shapefile and open it with Excel or other text program to edit and work with. It took me a while as well to figure what each file meant what! The file named "coords" is the point file with each corner, and the others are polygon files that define the county, township, section, and quarter section.

 

Once you have the shapefile(s) downloaded you can open it using the free ArcExplorer 2 program from ESRI to view it, but can't edit it. I would suggest using the free DNR Garmin program to open shapefiles. It is a stand-alone program but is also used as an extension for ArcView/ArcGIS to transfer data between GIS and GPSrs. With DNR you can edit the fields to keep only what you need and export a text file for example.

[+Timpat]

Hi Planewood, found another site just for your purpose. It is for the Oklahoma Center for Geospatial Info (OCGI). I grabbed both the Township and Section data for the entire state and took a look. Turns out to be 2,047 Townships, with 71,343 Sections. I was able to create a point for each section corner (and there are some extra vertex points at jogs in section lines) for a total of 486,921 points, and added Lat/Lon (NAD83) fields. If you can give me bounding limits for your area I can get a file for you that isn't so huge. PM me if you want so I have a contact email address to send some data.