Land status and federal mineral ownership in the Powder River basin, Wyoming and Montana; a digital data set for geographic information systems

As the Nation's energy resources continue to be examined for development, it is critical that a digital database exist that contains location data for all Federal land and mineral resources. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in cooperation with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), is collecting these ownership files and compiling them in Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc. (ESRI) ARC/INFO coverages, to form a standardized data library. A coverage is a digital version of a map in the form of vector data storage. These coverages are combined with models of coal deposits from the USGS National Coal Resource Assessment project, a five-year effort to identify and characterize the coal beds and coal zones that will provide fuel for the Nation’s energy needs during the first quarter of the twenty-first century. Geographic and geologic data layers are integrated in a Geographic Information System (GIS) to answer complex geo-spatial questions concerning coal resource occurrence.