Check out an updated public lands layer here.

One of the most common requests we get from Gaia GPS users is for Public Land Ownership data, which is useful for hunting, fishing, exploring, and even business purposes. Today, we’re making a land ownership layer available in Gaia GPS.

You can add the public land layer within Gaia GPS by going to “Add More Layers…” This overlay won’t work very well unless you have Gaia GPS Premium, because it needs to be layered with other base maps. You might have some basic use for it as a regular Gaia user.

We consider this to be a “beta” effort, and we’re releasing it to you because it’s useful to us, though incomplete. It has excellent coverage of California, fairly detailed coverage of the rest of western United States, including Alaska, and federal lands in the east. Here’s a summary view of the coverage, and you can also view the layer on gaiagps.com:

The colors are defined by the following legend, and there is also an entry in the user manual with this info. We’ll integrate it better in the future:

Here’s a screenshot using the layer with GaiaPro, on the iPad. I’m showing the weather panel just for fun, too:

Gaia GPS premium layers capability really shines here, and you can composite a vast amount of information, including USGS topos, MapBox aerials, Forest Service (USFS) maps, weather overlays, and your personal waypoints and tracks.

Today, our public land data collection efforts are stymied a bit by the shutdown of the US government, but we have plans to complete the data set, and integrate it more fully into Gaia GPS, with an interactive legend and alerts.

This project started out from one of our team’s personal interest in hunting (Jesse), and it’s an ongoing effort. Jesse last lived in Montana, before coming to Berkeley to work with us, and he depended on Elk he hunted for food. As with the rest of Gaia, this comes from the needs of people who spend a lot of time in the woods.

Finally for the technically-minded people. you can also view this GitHub gist for how to set up a tile server like this yourself.