CPAD does not currently have general ongoing funding for maintenance. As funds are made available for particular areas, or to help with overall updating, the new version of CPAD will be posted every six months. We welcome interest in helping support the maintenance of CPAD.

CPAD has been developed to support conservation and open space/recreation planning and public access - it is not an inventory of all public lands (for example, city halls, water treatment plants and other government-owned facility lands are not included). At the city level, recreation facilities that do not include significant open space have not been included (e.g. swimming pools, recreation halls, hardscape ball courts, etc., where these are not part of a park with green space) and many park boundaries show only the open space area of the holding, not associated buildings. Highly accurate GIS data on urban parks is often hard to obtain and parks must be verified by using aerial imagery - determining park-related buildings is difficult in these situations and so CPAD focuses on the more identifiable green space areas.

Military lands often have very significant natural resources but these lands are not primarily intended to be open space resources. Because of this primary use focus, they are not part of CPAD. However, we recognize the importance of considering military lands and encourage CPAD users to make use of the military lands layer on Cal-Atlas.

Tribal lands are not included in CPAD because they are the lands of Native American sovereign nations.

Submit an Error Report to tell us about errors or omissions or send an email to: cpad(at)calands.org. In the report, please include the Holding IDs and the county of any feature that you believe has errors in geometry or attributes. If possible, include a low resolution JPG image of the area at issue showing the location and nature of any error.

If you know of a protected area that is not yet in CPAD, please tell us the owning agency, ownership type, public access type, date of acquisition, assessor parcel number(s) and any other relevant information. Include a low resolution JPG image that clearly shows the location of the property.

Due to current lack of resources, we will not be able to respond to these inquiries, but we welcome them and will consider them in any updates that we are able to conduct.

The acreages in CPAD are calculated by the GIS system, based on the polygons in the file. Sometimes these polygons are exactly the same as the owning agency's data, other times they can vary - the following are the main explanations of acreage differences:

1. CPAD reports acreage by owning agency - so if one agency is managing a unit that includes property owned by another agency, CPAD will report only the acres owned by the first agency.
2. In general, CPAD relies on county assessor GIS parcels for property boundaries (for those counties with available GIS parcels) - these boundaries may be somewhat different than those defined in an owning agency's records, leading to acreage differences. There are many complications in resolving differences between what assessors and agencies show as property boundaries - users should remember that CPAD is a general planning and assessment resource, and is not intended to be an authoriative source for legal or other high specific property boundaries.
3. Easements are not included in CPAD data at this time. Some agencies may count easement acreage whereas CPAD would not include this acreage.

The CPAD database is built on individual parcels of land, called Holdings. Units are aggregated Holdings under a common name - for example, a state park may have several parcels (holdings) that make up the commonly known area ("Mt. Diablo State Park") which is the Unit. Where a park or open space is simply a single Holding, then the Unit is just the Holding (e.g., a small city park).

This structure has been used to allow for tracking new parcels that are added to some parks or open space areas over time, to allow for better integration with assessor parcel coding, and to account for where individual Holdings have different names than the overall Unit name of which they are a part.

In the CPAD data browser and in the ParkInfo browser Unit Names and IDs are shown.

GreenInfo’s ParkInfo web site is a full featured finder application for searching CPAD data on lands that are open or restricted access. The ParkInfo mapping application is also the basis for the California Dept. of Parks and Recreation FindRecreation web portal.

GreenInfo can easily adapt ParkInfo to be any agency’s or organization’s web map. By setting the initial view and selected parks list to an agency’s holdings, ParkInfo can be an effective interactive web portal. Without any customization, costs are usually $1-2,000 to create the park finder and install it in the host web site. Annual maintenance is about $100-250/year. For more information contact GreenInfo Network.

CPAD 1.5, ©June 2010 GreenInfo Network - www.calands.org