Park Tiles is a suite of general-use, public-facing web maps for the National Park Service designed to adhere to NPS graphic identity standards. Since late 2017, national datasets compiled from regional datasets and managed by the NPS Resource Information Services Division (RISD) serve as the primary source for NPS roads and trails in Park Tiles, and more recently, buildings and parking areas as well. Regional GIS coordinators can refer to this site to assure their data will be rendered in Park Tiles as they anticipate. It references relevant data attribute fields found in NPS Data Standards (Core, [draft] Buildings, Roads, Trails). If an attribute field is not discussed in this guide, values housed in that field will have no bearing on Park Tiles.
The national datasets provide roads, trails, buildings, and parking areas within park boundaries. In order to create a complete map for public use, Park Tiles 4 compiles data from a number of other sources, including NPS boundaries and tract data from the Land Resources Division; lakes, streams, and other water features from the National Hydrography Dataset (NHD); miscellaneous data, like recreation fields, boat docks, and pedestrian areas created and maintained by the RISD cartographer; and data provided by Mapbox, including OpenStreetMap (OSM) roads, trails, and water features outside park boundaries, hillshading, and contour lines.
Rules for displaying data in Park Tiles
- Core Standard
- Buildings
- Roads
- Trails
- Points of interest overlay on nps.gov maps
- Other data used in Park Tiles
Core Standard
PUBLICDISPLAY
Set features to "Public Map Display" to display in Park Tiles. Features marked "No Public Display" (default) will not display in Park Tiles.
DATAACCESS
Set features to "Unrestricted" to display in Park Tiles. Features marked "Internal NPS Only" (default) or "Secure Access Only" will not display in Park Tiles.
Furthermore, Park Tiles is based off of the public version of the National Datasets. Public National Data is defined by these two fields working together as follows. First, during the aggregation process, Null, Unknown, and empty string (" ") values for PUBLICDISPLAY and DATA ACCESS are converted to "No Public Map Display" and "Internal NPS Only", respectively. Once cleanup is completed, the public views (datasets) are defined by the following SQL, where clause logic ensures that only data intended to be public will make it into Park Tiles:
<blockquote><code>WHERE (PUBLICDISPLAY = 'Public Map Display') AND (DATAACCESS = 'Unrestricted')</code></blockquote>
Recommended best practices dictate that Regions should work with park management staff to ensure that these fields are set appropriately per stakeholders' requirements prior to submitting data into the National Aggregation process.
Buildings
Section pending the finalized building standard and the incorporation of enterprise building data from the Building Inventory Program into the national datasets. This is currently an ongoing process.
Buildings in Park Tiles are symbolized by one of two symbols: dark brown for publicly-accessible buildings, and a semi-transparent brown for those that are private or administrative-access only. Buildings are not labeled.
BLDGSTATUS
Set features to "Existing" (the default value) to display in Park Tiles. Buildings with any other entries in this field will not display in Park Tiles. Consult the building standard to review the list of accepted values for this field.
FACUSE
- "Admin Use": Buildings with this designation will receive a semi-transparent, faded appearance.
- "Public": Buildings with this designation will receive the standard, dark brown symbol.
- Null values will be treated like "Public" entries.
Roads
Roads in Park Tiles are symbolized to indicate hierarchy from highways down to service roads and parking aisles (see RDCLASS below). Roads are labeled in Park Tiles, so attention should be given to entering map-appropriate label text in the appropriate field (see MAPLABEL below).
MAPLABEL
Park Tiles will pull the road's label text from this field exclusively. If left blank, no label will appear.
RDSTATUS
Set features to "Existing" (the default value) to display in Park Tiles. Roads with any other entries in this field will not display in Park Tiles. Consult the road standard to review the list of accepted values for this field.
RDCLASS
This is the most important attribute for determining a road's symbol.
- "Unknown" (default): Will be assigned the equivalent symbol as "Local".
- "Primary": Will be assigned a wide yellow line. Note that the standard defines a primary road as a limited-access, multi-lane highway (like an interstate freeway), but this designation is typically used to represent two-lane highways (federal, state, or county) that serve as parks' main arterials.
- "Secondary": Will be assigned a white line symbol, less wide than a primary road.
- "Local": Will be assigned an off-white line symbol, less wide than a secondary road.
- "Service": A slender off-white line symbol.
- "Private": A slender, semi-transparent white line symbol. In addition, labels have the text "(Private)" appended.
- "Parking Lot Road": see "Service".
- "4WD": Will be assigned a slender off-white line with a dashed brown-gray casing.
RDONEWAY
Not currently implemented, but will be available in the future.
- "With Digitized": Arrows indicating the road's one-way direction will follow the direction the segment was digitized.
- "Against Digitized": Arrows indicating the road's one-way direction will run counter to the direction the segment was digitized.
- Arrows will not be added to road segments with null values.
Trails
Most trails receive a relatively simple symbol in Park Tiles—a narrow brown dashed line. Exceptions are noted below. Trails are labeled in Park Tiles, so attention should be given to entering map-appropriate label text in the appropriate field (see MAPLABEL).
MAPLABEL
Park Tiles will pull the road's label text from this field exclusively. If left blank, no label will appear. All-caps entries will be converted to title case.
TRLSTATUS
Set features to "Existing" (the default value) to display in Park Tiles. Trails with any other entries in this field will not display in Park Tiles. Consult the trail standard to review the list of accepted values for this field.
TRLTYPE
This is the main attribute for determining trail styling.
- "Unknown" (default): will be assigned the same symbol as "Standard Terra Trail"
- "Standard Terra Trail": will be assigned the standard, narrow brown dashed line. On its own it generally denotes unpaved trails.
- "Snow Trail": will be assigned a narrow bluish-white dashed line.
- "Water Trail": will be assigned a narrow light-blue dashed line.
TRLCLASS
Some entries in this field can modify the "Standard Terra Trail" symbol described above.
- "Class 4: Highly Developed" and "Class 5: Fully Developed": see paved surface description below.
TRLSURFACE
Some entries in this field can modify the "Standard Terra Trail" symbol described above.
- Paved surfaces, including "Asphalt", "Bituminous", "Brick", "Paver", "Concrete", "Masonry/Stone", "Metal", "Plastic", "Rubber", "Steel": paved trails and sidewalks are depicted with a narrow brown line—the same symbol as an unpaved trail, but without a dash pattern.
- "Wood": synonymous with boardwalks, will be assigned a wider brown dashed line with a narrow dash pattern
- All other values will leave the default line symbol for TRLTYPE= "Standard Terra Trail" (see above) unmodified.
Points of interest overlay on nps.gov maps
For more on this topic, see the Park Tiles points of interest page.
Other data used in Park Tiles
Legislative and management boundaries
A legislative boundary represents a park's maximal extent as defined by Congress. The management boundary represents the subset of those lands that have been acquired by the DOI/NPS and are therefore managed by the NPS. Many NPS units include private inholdings that are closed to the public and should not be included in the management boundary. The management boundary is frequently the boundary that parks choose to present to visitors on their print brochure maps. As Park Tiles is a visitor-oriented, general-use map, it represents legislative and management boundaries in a manner consistent with print brochure maps.
Park Tiles 4 shows both the legislative boundary (green outline and tintband) as well as the management boundary (green fill). Note how the management boundary mirrors the boundary depicted in the print brochure map in this view of Park Tiles. The simultaneous representation of both legislative and management boundaries provides the most flexibility for park units across the agency. For example, Gateway NRA consistently depicts its legislative boundary in its printed maps and has requested a consistent approach for Park Tiles.
Park Tiles 4 uses NPS legislative boundary data maintained by Lands Resources Division (LRD), with a handful of exceptions. Those few exceptions, like Acadia NP, are driven by park requests. Once a park unit and LRD reach an agreement on the park’s appropriate boundary representation, LRD data will be used for that park. Management boundaries are depicted through the use of LRD’s tract dataset. Tracts marked STATUS = FED (in other words, are owned and operated by the NPS) are given a green fill color. In a handful of instances, RISD staff make adjustments to the tract data in order to provide a representation consistent with print brochure maps.
Contextual data and edge-matching
Like its earlier versions, Park Tiles uses data sourced from OpenStreetMap (OSM) to depict roads, trails, buildings, administrative boundaries, and water features outside of NPS boundaries. OSM data is quite comprehensive across the United States, owing to its origins with US Census TIGER Line data and a large and active community of editors, making it well-suited for this purpose. We also maintain versions of Park Tiles that use only OSM data for roads, trails, buildings, and parking areas. These versions of Park Tiles have the suffix "OSM" appended to them.
Park Tiles 4 masks OSM data within NPS boundaries by placing the boundary fill over the OSM data in the layer stack. NPS data is then rendered over these filled boundaries. As OSM and NPS data vary greatly from each other, edge-matching problems at park boundaries are inevitable.
View the map here for an example of edge-matching issues at Pu`ukohola Heiau NHS. NPS data for the main road extends northwest from the park boundary to the next local street, with the symbol partially overlapping the symbol for the OSM data for the same road. The OSM data, labeled "Akoni Pule Hwy", ends at the park boundary. As their centerlines are not aligned, edge-matching errors create a discohesive and potentially confusing end result for the map user. RISD is aware of the issue and continues to think through potential solutions. At this time, most solutions involve some form of manual editing to align road and trail centerlines of the two datasets.
Important: NPS park staff must refrain from editing NPS data to align their geometries with a licensed product like OSM. This constitutes a violation of OSM’s Acceptable Use Policies.
Though OSM precludes using their data as a basis for editing NPS data, it is feasible, from a legal standpoint, to edit OSM data to match NPS data, as NPS data has no restrictions on its use and can serve as a basis for OSM edits. However this solution is not practical for most parks and regions for a number of reasons. Ultimately, RISD will likely pursue the development of an extract of roads and trails data sourced from the National Atlas/US Census TIGER Line data. This alone won't solve edge-matching issues, but it will provide us with the possibility to process the data according to our specific needs, and perhaps automate some of the needed editing tasks.
Use of the National Hydrography Dataset
The masking of OSM data within park boundaries, outlined above, necessitates the use of the National Hydrography Dataset (NHD) within NPS boundaries. As NHD data tends to have more detailed and precise geometries than comparable OSM data, this has the added benefit of improving the representation of streams and lakes within NPS units. RISD maintains an extract of NHD data, clipped to NPS boundaries, and will periodically refresh this data as the USGS publishes revisions.
Additional cartographic data
Park Tiles 4 uses several data layers that are not maintained in national datasets. These include park labels, runways, pedestrian areas, docks and marine structures, land recreation areas, forested areas, cemeteries, and historical extents, among others. Only RISD staff maintain and make edits to this data.