Summary

The Southwestern Region covers more than 20.6 million acres. It boasts thousands of recreation opportunities spread across six national forests in Arizona. Also, five national forests and a national grassland in New Mexico, and one national grassland each in Oklahoma and the Texas panhandle. The USFS required assistance in tasks. These tasks covered inventory, search, identify, assign type, attribute paved areas and align resulting found and known roads to imagery.

Problem and Solution

The USFS SW Region 3 needed to create a region-wide dataset as input to the PAVER software. This would support pavement condition surveys for engineering on all paved surfaces within campground areas (e.g. turnouts for vehicles/RVs). Also, all other paved FS features including boat ramps, bridge decks, parking lots, trail turnouts, rest areas, paved aprons transitioning a paved road to a gravel/dirt one (turnout), etc. Given not all paved area locations were known, government furnished property, data and imagery needed to survey and verify paved areas. 

Xentity created PAVER road polygons to help realign all USFS jurisdiction linear road features to match aerial photography within the project area. Also, Xentity created other pavement polygons. This step digitized paved surfaces within campground areas (e.g. turnouts for vehicles/RVs). Also, all other paved FS features including boat ramps, bridge decks, parking lots, trail turnouts, rest areas, paved aprons transitioning a paved road to a gravel/dirt one (turnout), etc.

Outcome and Benefit

The resulting products were multi-part polygon feature classes and types in ESRI geospatial databases (produced in Pro). All were delivered on provided USB drives. Also, all deliverable feature classes were digitized and delivered in NAD 83 UTM Zone 13N projection. Additionally, final products were emailed to designated USFS staff. However, final acceptance of the deliverables will not be completed until the aforementioned USB hard drive has been received.