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PAD-US Supporting Recreation and LWCF

By Gap Analysis Project

May 12, 2016

The federal government’s Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) program includes funding for individual states, along with support for Federal agencies’ programs.  Funding for states is premised on the development every five years of a State Comprehensive Outdoor Recreation Plan, or SCORP.  SCORPs are reviewed and approved by the National Park Service (NPS).

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INVENTORIES:  A key element in SCORPs is the inventorying of the current state of recreation opportunities in a state.  Most states do not have full GIS inventories of all local and regional parks, though they often have reasonable data on state and Federal protected areas.  PAD-US can help “fill in” some of these gaps for states that don’t have comprehensive inventory programs, where it has that data, and provide a road map of data standards and practices that can make such inventories easier to conduct.

LWCF GRANT TRACKING:   Most state LWCF grant funding goes for projects in public parks and protected areas. While some states have very good GIS tracking (polygons of grant areas, or at least point locations) of their LWCF grants, many have no GIS data on grant locations and may have inaccurate location descriptions in their LWCF reports submitted to NPS (for examplem indicated locations can be some distance from actual locations).  PAD-US allows users to see parks in relation to LWCF grant locations, improving accuracy.  For NPS, PAD-US can serve as a single-source base map to review LWCF grant locations.