Forest ownership in the conterminous United States circa 2014: distribution of seven ownership types - geospatial dataset

This data publication contains 250 meter raster data depicting the spatial distribution of forest ownership types in the conterminous United States. The data are a modeled representation of forest land by ownership type, and include three types of public ownership: federal, state, and local; three types of private: family (includes individuals and families), corporate, and other private (includes conservation and natural resource organizations, and unincorporated partnerships and associations); as well as Native American tribal lands. The most up-to-date data available were used in creating this data publication. A plurality of the ownership data were from 2014, but some data were as old as 2004.These data are designed for strategic analyses at a national or regional scale which require spatially explicit information regarding the extent, distribution, and prevalence of the ownership types represented. These data are not recommended for tactical analyses on a sub-regional scale, or for informing local management decisions. Furthermore, map accuracies vary considerably and thus the utility of these data can vary geographically under different ownership patterns.Two associated data publications; Nelson et al. (2010), and Hewes et al. (2014), also portray ownership types of the conterminous United States. The former primarily depicts National Forest and other public on the public side, and percent in corporate ownership on the private side, while the latter depicts public (federal, state, and local) and private (family, corporate, and other private) ownership categories. This new data publication breaks out a seventh ownership type (tribal). On 07/23/2020 a newer version of these data became available (Sass et al. 2020) that contains recently available data and differentiates a new private ownership category: Timber Investment Management Organizations (TIMOs) and Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs), which are presented as a combined category.