Digital Data for Payette National Forest Mineral Resource Assessment

This metadata describes a series of coverages that were developed
by the authors as a result of reviewing all available data and
drawing boundaries that they thought included areas that might
contain selected deposit types. (The deposit types include both
some from the Cox and Singer classification system and some
descriptive types that have not been formally described.) The
deposit types are:
>coal (lignite),
>hot springs gold-silver,
>gold-silver mixed metal veins,
>distal disseminated gold-silver,
>antimony veins,
>tungsten veins,
>low-sulfide gold-quartz veins,
>polymetallic layers and veins,
>copper-silver polymetallic veins,
>manganese layers and veins,
>barite layers and veins,
>porphyry copper-molybdenum,
>copper skarn,
>iron skarn,
>disseminated copper-silver,
>kuroko zinc-copper massive sulfide,
>hot spring mercury,
>gypsum and anhydrite,
>tungsten skarn,
>gold-bearing skarn,
>disseminated antimony,
>zinc-lead skarn, and
>copper-gold mixed-metal veins
See USGS Open File Report 98-219A for full descriptions of deposit
types. Some deposit types have boundaries for both favorable and
permissive areas for the occurrence of that type, although most
have only one.
The coverages that contain this information are called
>pnfcoal,
>pnfcummv,
>pnfskncu,
>pnfdiscu,
>pnfsknfe,
>pnfgyp,
>pnfhsau,
>pnfhshg,
>pnflosau,
>pnfmmvs,
>pnfmnlv,
>pnfplylv,
>pnfplyvd, and
>pnfporcu.
An item in each of these coverages called "CODE" relates to another
coverage that contains locations (points) of mineral properties
(pnfmines). That coverage contains a lookup table - pnfmines.dm -
that describes the meaning of the data in the "CODE" items.
Several related polygon coverages are used to produce maps. These
include: pnfbdy (boundary of Payette National Forest), pnfmdist
(mining district boundaries), pnftandr (township grid for Forest),
pnfsec (section grid), pnftic (15 minute tics), and pnfwild
(wilderness boundaries). Three line coverages (pnfrivs - rivers,
pnfroad - roads, and pnfsnake - Snake River) were also used.
These coverages were obtained either from the Forest Service or
U.S. Bureau of Mines (now closed).