Public Land Disposition Mapping

Creating the Spatial Inventory of Activities on Public Land

A disposition is a land use contract that gives specific rights to a land or resource user (e.g. lease, license or permit). Typical disposition types seen on public land may include:

  • Grazing
  • Recreation
  • Roads
  • Well sites
  • Pipelines
  • Timber production

Significant improvements in operational efficiencies and an improved ability to plan activities on the land, can benefit government and industry users if the data is digital, accessible and accurate. However, in order to fully recognize these benefits, there needs to be a single, coordinated system to load and manage submitted survey plans on public lands.

Challenges in Public Land Disposition Mapping

The challenge many governments face with the collection, management and compilation of public land disposition data is:

  • Complexity of magnitude: Provincial or state scale issues associated with complexity and volume.
  • Data formats: Survey data is in multiple sources or formats and may not be georeferenced, making it difficult to compile and maintain.
  • The state of the original information: Originals may still be in mylar, paper hardcopy, which may be inaccurate, poorly maintained and difficult to access.
  • Costs: Inefficiencies leading to higher costs to compile and maintain the data.
  • Sustainment: Building and maintaining a current database can be challenging with government budgets.
Creating Systems to Manage Historical and Future Dispositions

MNC has developed systems – both processes and software – to help manage public land disposition data. Our approach to creating and sustaining this valuable data is:

  1. Map all the historical dispositions.
  2. Input and maintain future dispositions (assuming mandatory digital submissions).
  3. Develop a funding model, such as having a filing/mapping fee paid by the initiator of the change to cover the cost of updating.

The benefits realized by governments and other end users as a result of our re-engineered public land disposition maintenance processes include:

  • Significant reduction in manual labour, administrative and copying costs.
  • Streamlining of the submission process using a standardized digital filing system.
  • The creation of a single definitive mapping layer and associated dataset of dispositions that all users and participants active on public lands (including industry, policy makers and regulators at all levels of government) could use to plan and coordinate activities.

MNC also offers experience in creating sustainment models which enable industry, the public and governments access to up-to-date datasets, under a recoverable cost model that fits budgets (such as affordable user-pay systems and back-loading options).