New England Protected Open Space

The New England Protected Open Space dataset maintained by Harvard Forest is a compilation of existing open space datasets in the New England region including The Nature Conservancy's Secured Areas, National Conservation Easement Database, Protected Areas Database of the U.S., and data provided by states and land trusts. See metadata for each version for version-specific information and information about fields.

Version 1.2 was developed between May 2021 and March 2022, and was published in March 2023. Version 1.2 has new data from multiple sources added circa May 2021, more complete attribute information, and tribal lands removed. See metadata for more details. File geodatabase and shapefile versions are provided - refer to metadata for full field names if using shapefile version, as names will be truncated.

Important note about versions of NE POS: NE POS is a dataset we maintain for research purposes, and research projects can take varying lengths of time. Versions of NE POS may be uploaded to Zenodo "out of order," meaning older versions of data may be uploaded after more recent versions have been published.  Use the version number to identify the recency of the data rather than the date of upload.