Watershed and public-land tagging

A record with a GPS point can be tagged with the area it falls in: its HUC watershed and the public-land unit it sits on. This adds standards-aligned spatial context without anyone looking it up by hand.

Who can do this

This needs the Admin role.

Tagging runs from a survey type’s records page. A regional admin tags only their region’s records.

Tag the records

Open a survey type’s Records. If the type has a location (a geometry field), choose Tag watershed / public land. CensusIO reads each record’s GPS point and looks up:

• the HUC watershed (HUC12 code + name) from the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset, and
• the public-land unit it falls in (name, managing agency, designation) from PAD-US.

It works through the whole set a page at a time, showing progress, skips records already tagged, and looks up records that share a site only once.

Your own boundary layers

If your agency has its own boundary data, a management-unit or district layer, upload it under map layers and pick it from the dropdown next to Tag watershed / public land. CensusIO then also tags each record with the feature of that layer it falls in, so records pick up your own unit names alongside the national watershed and public-land context. Matching against your layer happens locally; nothing about your layer leaves CensusIO.

What the lookup sends

To resolve a watershed or land unit, CensusIO sends the record’s coordinate to the relevant public US government service (USGS, USFS PAD-US). It stores only the result (the codes and names), never the record’s other data. The public-land service is sometimes unavailable; when it is, the watershed is still tagged and the land unit fills in on a later run.

In the export

The tags travel into the Darwin Core Archive and the occurrence CSV: the watershed name as waterBody, the HUC12 as higherGeographyID, the watershed, land unit, and any uploaded-layer label as higherGeography, and the land manager, designation, and layer label in dynamicProperties. So a published dataset carries its watershed, protected-area, and management-unit context in the standard terms, ready for GBIF and the biodiversity networks.

Related

• Locations
• Exporting records