Cloud-optimized, hex-indexed versions of CPAD (v2025b)
A statewide map of publicly owned and protected land in California: who owns each holding, at what level of government, and which agency manages it. Compiled by CAL FIRE and published as the California Land Ownership layer.
57,404 polygons · EPSG:4326 · CC-BY-4.0
The publisher filters privately owned land out before release. Private land appears as empty space, not as a category you can select — there is no owner type meaning "private". A polygon being absent means the land is not in public or protected ownership; it is not a gap in the data.
To find private or unprotected land, take the difference between a study area and this layer rather than filtering within it.
This is a snapshot of ownership as compiled in May 2026, not a time series.
The features are ownership polygons, not assessor parcels, and carry no parcel number. Their size range is very wide — about a third are under one acre and more than half under ten acres, while the largest are single federal management units running to millions of acres. A small feature often coincides with one parcel on the ground, but nothing guarantees that, and there is no identifier here to join against a county assessor roll. For comparison, the parcel-level CPAD Holdings layer in this bucket carries roughly twice as many features over slightly less ground, because adjoining holdings in common ownership are not split here and large federal units are included.
Shape__AreThe publisher computes it in Web Mercator (EPSG:3857), which stretches area with latitude. Across
California these values run about 58% above true ground area (measured: 349,600 km² of
Shape__Are against a 221,696 km² H3 footprint). Fifteen polygons carry a value of zero. Measure
area in an equal-area projection, or from the H3 footprint on the hex asset.
The PMTiles source-layer is ca-land-ownership-2026.
One hex row is one (feature, cell) pair, so per-feature values repeat across cells. Count
features with COUNT(DISTINCT _cng_fid), and deduplicate on _cng_fid before combining
Shape__Are or Shape__Len.
Resolution 8 is the catalog's common join key, and every feature is present at every
resolution (no nulls in h10, h9, h8 or h0).
For ground area from the hex footprint, follow the H3 area guidance in the h3-guide rather than summing a source column.
Retrieved from the California Natural Resources Agency open data portal on 2026-09-14 as a
WGS 84 shapefile export, staged unmodified at s3://public-cpad/raw/ca-land-ownership-2026.zip:
sha256 681e5281064860734f2d5ba0191378f7a7a678ca8209199ddabddbad24c19913md5 465b71bee8f718fd9223c29da64d4080The export carried 57,404 polygons, matching the count published by the source service at access time. The publisher labels the edition only as "updated May, 2026" and issues no version identifier; the underlying protected-areas source is CPAD 2025b.
How it was compiled. CAL FIRE built it primarily from GreenInfo Network's California Protected Areas Database (CPAD 2025b), supplemented — because CPAD has known federal gaps — with the US Fish and Wildlife Service FWSInterest dataset, the Department of Defense Military Bases dataset, and Bureau of Indian Affairs Surface Trust and LAR datasets. Where sources overlap, priority runs FWS → BIA → CPAD → DoD. Inputs are clipped to the California boundary.
CC-BY-4.0. Terms: https://data.ca.gov/dataset/california-land-ownership-public
Attribution is owed to CAL FIRE and, through it, to GreenInfo Network (CPAD 2025b), the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the US Department of Defense, and the US Bureau of Indian Affairs.