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.

Data are provided with the full attribute table and with minimal attribute table that keeps only the most essential fields (these have "_min" in the file name).

The data with full and minimal attribute tables are available as file geodatabase feature classes (POS.gdb.zip) and shapefiles (POSv1_1_April2021.zip, POSv1_1_April2021_min.zip).

It is recommended to use the geodatabase feature class if you have access to Esri products, as the POS field names are all longer than 10 characters and are truncated in the shapefile versions.

Version 1.1 is a partial update, rather than an exhaustive update using all data sources - please read the metadata for more details!