Quite often I’m asked if landgrid changes. It sure does. Since March 2005 we have added data to over 13,000 townships across the US. As Jeff Smith stated in his September 1st blog, most of the changes have occurred with the addition of BLM and other government data. The US Forest Service publishes maps that include newly added sections and townships. We have been working on capturing this data as well.

In addition to the PLSS, Texas has seen it’s fair share of edits. Since March 2005 over 30,000 data modifications have been made. At WhiteStar we take pride in the continual improvement of our databases.  Our Unlimited Grid Access subscribers are able to take advantage of these continual improvements.  For more information on Unlimited Grid Access click here.

If you have any questions about Unlimited Grid Access feel free to contact us and we’ll give you a personal demo.

-Mike Schiewe

Sometimes you want to create a land map showing the quarter quarters for that township, because your land parcels are described in terms of NW NW, SE SE, etc. and you wish to plot your land ownership on a map.   This is a perfect application for our Legal2map web service.  I created a 576 line long polygon description of the township 26S 12W in the 6th Principal Meridian.  I had one entry in the text file for each aliquot piece I wanted to generate, for example SE SE of section 1, SE SW of section 1, etc.    I then ran the file through legal2map and it produced the desired 576 polygon representation of the township (36 sections * 16 aliquot pieces = 576).   Using this technique you can create quarter quarters in shapefile format for any section and/or township you want in the USA.  See the attached PDF for a closer look!

Regards,

Robert

I was browsing the New Mexico State Lands web site the other day and came across these hard copy reports of oil and gas leases that the state wishes to lease in mid December. Here is the link to that web site: http://www.nmstatelands.org/default.aspx?PageID=36 in case you’re interested.

This site has legal descriptions for each lease as well as the total acres, primary rental fee, and the minimum acceptable bid. Using our legal2map web service, I keyed in the 49 legal descriptions as well as the other attributes I was interested in, then produced the polygons with the web service. Using ArcGIS and FME Workbench from Safe Software, I merged the Comma Separated Value (CSV) attribute file with the shape file. In ArcGIS I added our township and range data, well location data, and culture information (mainly roads and dry lake beds, but you wouldn’t want to drill a well in a dry lake bed if you could avoid it, would you?).  Here’s a link to the map I made:  http://www.whitestar.com/blog/?attachment_id=24

The entire excercise took about 2 hours and I greatly improve the quality of my decision making with all these additional sources of information and making my leases visual and mappable.  I also added the state oil and gas well data (using UWA) to show what leases already have production on them.  Sweet!

I went through this excercise to show you the power of putting together readily available pieces of information so that you can make the best decisions possible which is very important considering the high value of leasing programs these days.

Regards,

Robert