ABSTRACTS

SaLIS vol. 63, no. 4

2003

 

Cadastral Development and Issues in the U.S.

Dr. Grenville Barnes

Guest Editor

 

I was approached to guest edit a special “cadastral issue” of this journal, in part to mark the 20 year anniversary of the NRC publication entitled “Procedures and Standards for a Multipurpose Cadastre.” This was one of a series of national publications on this topic and for many, I suspect, it is regarded as marking the heyday of the cadastre in the U.S.  At that time everyone was speaking about the multipurpose cadastre and how this system would be constructed in every county across the country. These were exciting times for those of us who were lucky enough to be graduate students during the mid-1980s. However, today, this term is barely mentioned in the popular literature.  Does this mean that the need for a multipurpose cadastre has diminished or disappeared behind a GIS cloud? To address this question we have assembled a diverse sample of papers written by authors from the private sector, state and federal government, and the academia.

This issue of Surveying and Land Information Science displays how far we have progressed in the past twenty years, and how much of what was originally declared as “procedures and standards” has held up over the years.  In the opening paper, David Cowen and Will Craig give us an interesting retrospective view of how the multipurpose cadastre concept has evolved over the past two decades. Remember that in 1983, GPS was unknown, GIS was in its infancy, and Ronald Reagan was president. 

In 1983, Nancy von Meyer, the author of the second paper, was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. In the mid-eighties, UW played a lead role in the development of cadastral (or land information system) thinking, and many still point to Wisconsin as having one of the most progressive land information systems. Since leaving UW with her Ph.D., Nancy has become without doubt the best known name in U.S. cadastral circles. In this issue,Nancy describes her latest cadastral exploits associated with the implementation of the FGDC cadastral standard in Arc GIS.

Although in this issue we take a broad view of the cadastre, many surveyors still regard the cadastre and cadastral surveying as being synonymous with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). They have clearly led the way at the federal level, and Leslie Cone from BLM’s Denver office provides further evidence of this in her paper describing the National Integrated Land System, or NILS, currently being implemented by her agency. NILS is designed to develop a common data model so that cadastral and other data can be integrated both horizontally between different federal agencies and vertically between BLM and other levels of government. As project manager of NILS, and with over 25 years of experience at the BLM, Leslie is ideally positioned to describe the cadastral efforts being undertaken through NILS.

The 1983 multipurpose cadastre concept rightly envisaged a system that catered for both manual and digital data. The digital revolution experience over the past twenty years has had a major impact on cadastral systems. Even though many poorer county agencies still manage paper cadastral records, it is only a matter of time before all counties and cadastral agencies at other levels move to automated systems.  David Stage’s paper provides an interesting overview of how far the digital revolution has swept through the country. It reports on a study of cadastral automation in the states, including an investigation of how many parcels have been converted to a digital format.

The last three papers in this special content issue deal with more specific applications of cadastral systems.  My associates and I at the University of Florida describe a project in which we used historical tax roll data, maintained by the county property appraisers, to develop a spatio-temporal cadastral database. This database will be used to examine relationships between land ownership, land cover/land use and, ultimately, carbon sequestration within the forests of the southeastern U.S.

Gary Jeffress, from the University of Texas, Corpus Christi, describes two fascinating boundary disputes in Texas.  The stakes are high in Texas, and cadastral surveyors can clearly have a huge impact on who are the winners and losers.  Gary recounts one dispute over 35,000 acres of mud flats along the south Texas coast. The fact that these mud flats cover certain oil fields has raised the stakes to $40 million!

The web is altering not only the way we access cadastral data, but also the fundamental design of cadastral systems. In the last paper of this issue, Robert Stevens, University of Oregon, and Stewart Kirkpatrick, the Montana state GIS coordinator, present the results of an analysis of Montana’s Cadastral Mapping Project web site. Using cost-benefit analysis, Robert and Stewart arrive at a favorable benefit-cost ratio of 1.6. In real terms they estimate that users are enjoying a time saving of 65 percent and a total cost saving of $5.3 million across the full set of users. No question about the return on this investment.

The papers in this issue all demonstrate that the multipurpose cadastre concept is alive and well.  However, it has moved to a more fundamental level than that envisaged by the NRC in 1983. The emphasis is now on a spatial data infrastructure which will facilitate better communication between different members of the cadastral community.

What will shape the cadastral system over the next twenty years?  Access to information will continue to improve, unless confidentiality and security concerns present virtual roadblocks. Real-time applications will amplify….and existing institutional arrangements will persist in the face of all this technical change. And, maybe, that is not such a bad thing after all.

 

A Retrospective Look at the Need for a Multipurpose Cadastre

David J. Cowen and William J. Craig

 

The 1980 NRC1 study “Need for a Multipurpose Cadastre” represented a landmark in the history of the automation of land records systems in the United States. At the national policy level it boldly asserted that the parcel of property ownership should be the fundamental building block for an integrated system of land information to support a wide range of decision-making. Furthermore, in no uncertain terms, it stated that the creation and maintenance of the cadastre can only be done at the local government level; however, it is the responsibility of the federal government to foster the integration of these local datasets through a set of consistent standards, funding programs and coordination with each state. The purpose of this paper is to review the recommendations of the report, attempt to assess the status of those recommendations, summarize subsequent related NRC activities, highlight what has not changed, and assess the current federal geospatial landscape. We also examine the issues that will impact the evolution of the multipurpose cadastre from this point forward. 

 

Implementing the FGDC Cadastral Standard in ArcGIS™

Nancy von Meyer

 

The Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) Subcommittee for Cadastral Data completed version 1 of the Data Content Standard for Cadastral Data in 1996.  Since 1996 the standard has been continuously maintained and updated. The current version (1.3) was completed in May 2003 and reflects all comments and experience with implementing the standard as of early spring 2003 (FGDC 2003). The Cadastral Data Content Standard provides semantic definitions of objects related to land surveying, land records, and landownership information. Because of its breadth it has been viewed by some reviewers as too complicated to implement, yet the complexity of landownership in the United States calls for a robust and highly interrelated description of data elements. To overcome the perceived challenge of implementing this standard, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Cadastral Survey, the FGDC Subcommittee for Cadastral Data, and the Environment Systems Research Institute (ESRI) worked together to develop an implementation of the standard for an ArcGIS™ geodatabase. The model was completed and tested in several counties and in federal land management systems. The result is a general-purpose object-based design that can be deployed on any software platform that implements the Cadastral Data Content Standard. This paper describes the FGDC standard and the data model developed for implementation and gives examples of the use of this model in land records systems.

 

The National Integrated Land System

Leslie Cone

 

The National Integrated Land System (NILS) project is the first step toward providing a common solution for the sharing of land record information within the government and the private sector. The concept behind the project implies the development of a common data model and a set of GIS tools that unify the worlds of surveying and GIS. This unification concept is fundamental for land records managers and maintainers of cadastral mapping databases to improve the accuracy and quality of the data so as to create standard land descriptions and cadastral data that can be used by anyone. Commercial off-the-shelf GIS technology forms the foundation of NILS, along with custom object-oriented software. NILS complies with the Federal Geographic Data Committee Cadastral Data Content Standard and the Geospatial Metadata Content Standard.

 

An Assessment of Parcel Data in the United States

David Stage

 

The Federal Geographic Data Committee’s (FGDC) Subcommittee on Cadastral Data is developing a Cadastral Core Data Content Standard to facilitate the creation of a national parcel database.  Challenges include: 1) providing data that meet the business requirements of regional users; 2) the development of a regional coverage from over 4000 local government sources that are not uniformly collecting the data; and 3) the considerable variation in state institutional infrastructure that supports parcel data development. As daunting as these issues appear, recent pilot studies indicate that the creation of a regional and even a national parcel database is a reasonable goal. Currently the FGDC Cadastral Subcommittee, having developed a national cadastral standard and a draft cadastral core data standard, has begun addressing implementation strategies.  Understanding the current status and trends of the conversion of parcel maps to parcel databases is essential to planning such an effort. This paper provides a brief history of the development of the cadastral standards and the results of a national survey to assess the status of the United States cadastral data infrastructure.

 

Developing a Spatio-Temporal Cadastral Database Using County Appraisal Data from Northern Florida

Grenville Barnes, Anurag Agrawal, Levent Genc, Balaji Ramachandran, Vijay Sivaraman, Bharath Pudi, Michael Binford, and Scot Smith

 

American forests have come to represent more than the biological sum of their trees. They are the material and symbols society wields in its debates over nature, the environment, natural resources, and property [Heasley and Guries 1998].

 

Increasing attention is being paid to understanding the human part of the human-environment relationship (NRC 1998), motivated in part by the extreme destruction wrought by humans in forested environments such as the Amazon (Nepstad et al 1999). Clearly, who owns the land and forest is an important factor in how these resources are used and managed because different land owners have different management objectives (Carter and Jokela 2002). In the lower southeastern plain of the United States (Figure 1a), forested and surrounding areas may be owned by the state (Florida), timber companies, NIPF (non-industrial private forest) owners, mining companies, or commercial (non-timber) companies. 

This paper describes the cadastral component of an inter-disciplinary research project undertaken at the University of Florida with funding from NASA’s Land Cover and Land Use Change Program (LCLUP). The cadastral objectives of the project were to document changes in land ownership patterns over the past 25 years (1975 to 2000). This information would then be used to analyze how these land ownership changes (a) impact land use and land cover changes, and (b) whether land ownership affects carbon dynamics in the region.

To investigate these questions we randomly selected four sample sites, all located on a single Landsat image (path 17, row 39) (Figure 1 b). We rejected all randomly generated sites that fell in large water bodies or urban areas. We then fitted a 15 x 15 km area around each site so that the perimeter of the study site coincided exactly with the boundaries of the Public Land Survey System (PLSS). Each study site thus contained a 9 x 9 section area (Figures 2a, b and c). To avoid having to visit more than one county appraiser’s office for each site, we also ensured that each site was located entirely in a single county. Although we began the project with four study sites—Alachua County, Hamilton County, Clay County and Union County—we subsequently dropped Union County due to time pressure.

 

 

The Value of Cadastral Surveying to Efficient Land Administration

Gary A. Jeffress

 

The value of a cadastral surveying system to efficient land administration is highlighted when disputes arise over land title and the location of land boundaries. This paper discusses two case studies in Texas which demonstrate the value cadastral surveyors create in preparing legal documentation for land and real estate and relating that documentation to the location of the property on the ground.  It is argued that the cadastral surveying system creates as much value in land and real estate as does the legal system.

 

Cost-Benefit Analysis of Montana’s Cadastral Mapping Project Website

Robert Stevens and Stewart Kirkpatrick

 

Part of the larger cadastral core data initiative in Montana consisted of a cost-benefit analysis of the Montana Cadastral Mapping Project web page http://doaisdvm003.isd.doa.state.mt.us/website/montana/.1 The purpose of this study was threefold:

Quantify what level of efficiency, on average, users of the web service have experienced;

Demonstrate that the efficiency benefits realized to date have contributed towards a good return on investment, and have resulted in a short break-even period for the State of Montana; and

Make the point that thousands of individuals, from realtors to other state employees, continue to make use of the site on a daily basis.

 

Letter to the Editor

Re: “The Education Challenge,” Surveying and Land Information Science, Vol. 63, No. 2, 2003

 

As a person involved with the changes in the surveying program at the University of Maine I wish to respond to the recent editorial in Surveying and Land Information Science, “The Education Challenge” by Gunther Greulich.