Summary

Description

The Baseline Inventory Team was chartered by the Fulfilling the Promises Implementation Team to recommend minimum abiotic and biotic inventories for the National Wildlife Refuge System. On January 2004, the Baseline Inventory Team produced the report Baseline Inventory Data Recommendations for National Wildlife Refuges. This report identified the types of abiotic data layers that every National Wildlife Refuge should have at a minimum for planning and daily management. The primary abiotic layers described in the Baseline Inventory report were: Topography, Aerial Photography, Hydrography, Soils, Boundaries and Infrastructure Manmade features. The Baseline Inventory Data: Users Guide to Abiotic GIS Layers is intended to help refuge staff locate and download the basic abiotic layers or other spatial data available for lands within and outside refuge boundaries. This guide is intended to be simple and fairly straightforward with hyperlinks to online data warehouses and screenshots for easy navigation. This document identifies sources for geospatial data and describes the process for downloading abiotic GIS layers.