Cutlines and OHV Trails in the Crown of the Continent Ecosystem

This dataset was developed by the Crown Managers Partnership, as part of a transboundary collaborative management initiative for the Crown of the Continent Ecosystem, based on commonly identified management priorities that are relevant at the landscape scale. The CMP is collaborative group of land managers, scientists, and stakeholder in the CCE. For more information on the CMP and its collaborators, programs, and projects please visit: http://crownmanagers.org/This geodatabase contains all freely available spatial information on trails accessible by All-Terrain-Vehicles (ATV’s) as well as utility and logging cutlines in the Crown of the Continent area. Due to the free nature of the data, it is of mixed quality and should not be considered inclusive of all eligible trails actually in the region.Processing:(i) All datasets which were not already in the NAD83 UTM11 Projected Coordinate System were reprojected to it.(ii) All data was clipped to the Crown of the Continent region of interest using the 5km buffered shapefiles.(iii) Although publication or dataset updates are provided by most sources, actual construction or clearing dates for the features were absent from all datasets. Due to this, a year 2000 baseline could not be derived. A possible exception is the TIGER2000 source which, by its name and nature, may be presumed to be an accurate account of features existing in the year 2000.(iv) Very few trails in the TIGER2000 dataset were identified with the feature code that specified ATV accommodation. Thus, the number of features captured were limited relative to the total comprehensive documentation of other linear features in the source.(v) Many linear features, mostly trails, in Alberta were found to conflict and overlap with the existing road shapes in the Crown. In these cases, the competing features were edited or deleted, yielding to the roads, to eliminate this conflict while preserving as much feature geometry as possible. It is possible that some of the accounted road shapes are, in fact, trails and will require revision to both data layers.(vi) Redundant linear features from different trail and cutline sources were also identified in Alberta. Based on the usefulness of attribute information, features from certain sources were given precedence over others as follows: Castle_dist_linear_all.shp > SRD > Quad Squad. NTDB was added after the others were assembled and thus was made to yield to the existing features, agnostic of relative source attribute quality.(vii) Extraneous attribute fields from the source data were trimmed for brevity in the final product dataset. Remaining fields were translated and aligned under a simplified set of fields in the end product.