Bureau of Land Management Surface Land Ownership (2012)

These data was collected by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in New Mexico at both the New Mexico State Office and at the various field offices. This dataset is meant to depict the surface owner or manager of the land parcels. In the vast majority of land parcels, they will be one and the same. However, there are instances where the owner and manager of the land surface are not the same. When this occurs, the manager of the land is usually indicated. BLM's Master Title Plats are the official land records of the federal government and serve as the primary data source for depiction of all federal lands. Information from State of New Mexico is the primary source for the depiction of all state lands. Auxilliary source are referenced, as well, for the depiction of all lands. Collection of this dataset began in the 1980's using the BLM's ADS software to digitize information at the 1:24,000 scale. In the mid to late 1990's the data was converted from ADS to ArcInfo software and merged into tiles of one degree of longitude by one half degree of latitude. These tiles were regularly updated. The tiles were merged into a statewide coverage. The source geodatabase for this shapefile was created by loading the merged ArcInfo coverage into a personal geodatabase. The geodatabase data were snapped to a more accurate GCDB derived land network, where available. In areas where GCDB was not available the data were snapped to digitized PLSS. In 2006, the personal geodatabase was loaded into an enterprise geodatabase (SDE). This shapefile has been created by exporting the feature class from SDE.