Why do the US National Park projects/places not include water? While uploading recent pictures from a trip to Acadia National Park, I noticed the lakes within the NPS boundaries were not included into the park. Can anyone explain why these aren’t included?
i think iNat created these based on boundaries provided by the NPS. i would assume these are the same boundaries utilized by other platforms that display national parks boundaries. for example, ESRI / ArcGIS also has boundaries for Acadia NP that don’t include large bodies of water (see https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=e62a2420170b4452b4a334db92130220), and they note:
Per NPS, “Boundary polygons have been created by the Lands Resources Program according to the procedures defined in the Lands Acquisition Procedures Manual. Boundaries were created with data provided by Parks, Region, and Program offices. This data includes but is not limited to deeds, legal descriptions, legislation, survey plats, change orders, segment maps, and the ownership databases of the Land Resources Program.”
so if that’s correct, then i would guess that the reason that the park boundaries in iNat don’t include water is that those bodies of water aren’t technically part of the park. you could probably contact NPS’s GIS folks to find out more information. there’s contact info on this page: https://irma.nps.gov/DataStore/Reference/Profile/2225713.
I changed the title of the topic to make it more specific.
And correct, we made those places in 2015/2016 for NPS when we worked with them on the NPS Centennial Bioblitz, based on the boundaries they sent us.
Large bodies of water in the USA would be considered “Navigable Waters.” It is my understanding that the land under these waters generally belong to the individual states (or to persons allowed ownership under state law) rather than to the US government. Thus, they would technically not be part of National Parks. For legalese, see https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title43/chapter29/subchapter2&edition=prelim
i’m not sure that’s the actual story of what’s going on. if you look at Yellowstone in the ArcGIS Online map, large bodies of water are definitely located within those boundaries. also note that most parks on the map are represented in green, meaning Federal (fee) land, and most of Acadia is represented in orange, meaning generic “public” land. i’m not sure exactly what the distinction is here, but i do know that Acadia NP is known for originating from land donated by private individuals, and i would assume that private owners wouldn’t have purchased lakes and such, and maybe that’s why lakes and such are excluded from park boundaries. i think the best explanation needs to come from NPS or folks who are connected to Acadia NP.