public-blm/utah-federal-mineral-estate: BLM Utah federal mineral estate by commodity

[cassiebuhler]

Source

Landing page: https://gis.blm.gov/utarcgis/rest/services/Lands/BLM_Utah_Federal_Minerals_Map_Service/FeatureServer
Publisher: BLM Utah State Office (copyrightText = "Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Utah State Office").
Edition: none published — live service, no version or release date. Snapshot, accessed 2026-09-22.

Verified 2026-09-22:

FeatureServer/11/query?where=1=1&returnCountOnly=true  ->  101,585
FeatureServer/1  (All Minerals)                        ->   91,342

What the data is, and what it is for

The current federal mineral estate in Utah: which parcels carry federally owned minerals, and which
commodity classes those minerals fall into. Polygons are GCDB/PLSS-derived aliquot parts
(GCDBDIVID, Section_, TR-style legal description fields), so the grain is the survey
subdivision, not a case or a lease.

This is ownership of the mineral estate, distinct from the MLRS layers already published
(#486 and siblings), which are rights granted on it. Utah is heavily split-estate, so surface
ownership does not imply the minerals.

Consumer: utah-public-lands.

One feature class, not ten

The service exposes 11 layers, but they are definition-query views over a single feature class —
every layer returns the same 39 fields, and layer 11 ("All Polygons in Dataset", 101,585 features)
is the unfiltered table. Commodity membership lives in ten flag columns on each row:

column	layer	features
ALL_MIN	1 All Minerals	91,342
Oil_Gas	2	5,838
Coal	3	4,041
Oil_Shale	4	2,282
Gilsonite	5	174
Potash_Pot	6	781
Sodium	7	707
Phosphate	8	652
Geo_Steam	9	313
Unknown_	10	314

The per-layer counts sum to 106,444 against 101,585 rows, so a parcel can carry more than one
commodity flag. Ingesting the ten views separately would duplicate geometry and lose that; one row
per parcel with the flags retained preserves it.

Coded values, resolved 2026-09-22

The flag columns are 2-char strings taking X, I, '' and null. The service field metadata
defines no domain, but the layer's FGDC metadata document does
(FeatureServer/11/metadata), identically for all ten flags:

• X = Federal Minerals
• I = Indian Minerals

Unknown_ is defined as "Reservations unknown". A commodity view selects flag IN ('X','I');
empty string is excluded. Staging normalises '' to null so "not null" is exactly upstream view
membership. Full count table and the quoted metadata: the scoping comment below.

Other fields carried: GlobalID, Serial_NR, Patent_NR, County, Admin, GCDBDIVID,
Section_, GIS_Acres. Dropped as unusable (verified against all 101,585 rows):
CreatedByRecord / RetiredByRecord (0 rows populated, metadata says "Not being used"),
VALIDATIONSTATUS (constant 2), and all CREATE_* / MODIFY_* / created_* / last_edited_*
fields (1900 sentinel or single bulk-migration timestamp; publishing them invites reading a
record-management artifact as an edition date).

Spatial extent

Full upstream extent: Utah statewide. The service is a Utah State Office product and has no
features outside Utah.

Source CRS is EPSG:26912 (NAD83 / UTM zone 12N).

H3 native and parent resolutions

native 9, parents 8, 0 — parcels are PLSS aliquot parts, commonly 40 acres (~0.16 km²), which sits
between res 8 (0.74 km²) and res 9 (0.105 km²). h8 carried per the catalog join-key rule.

Reducer (rasters only)

n/a — vector.

Target bucket and dataset path

s3://public-blm/, dataset utah-federal-mineral-estate

Bucket chosen by publisher, consistent with the other BLM layers in the catalog. It is the only
state-scoped dataset in public-blm; say so if that argues for public-utah instead.

Licence, with evidence

public-domain (SPDX). US federal agency product. The layer's FGDC metadata
(FeatureServer/11/metadata) states the constraint directly:

Access Constraints: None, these data are considered public domain.

copyrightText is an attribution string only. BLM terms: https://www.blm.gov/disclaimer

Acceptance criteria

• One row per parcel (101,585 from layer 11), not the ten commodity views concatenated.
• All ten commodity flag columns present; a parcel flagged for two commodities appears once.
• Per-flag counts reproduce the upstream layer counts in the table above (ALL_MIN non-null → 91,342, Coal → 4,041, …).
• X = Federal Minerals / I = Indian Minerals documented in table:columns, cited to the layer's FGDC metadata; '' normalised to null so "not null" equals upstream view membership.
• Reprojected from EPSG:26912 to EPSG:4326.
• Access date 2026-09-22, staged raw path, size and checksum in the STAC (checksum recomputed from the object).
• h3:native_resolution = 9, h3:parent_resolutions = [8, 0].
• SPDX public-domain + {"rel": "license"} link.
• table:columns populated; scripts/verify-stac.py --bucket public-blm --dataset utah-federal-mineral-estate exits 0.

Known blockers

• X vs I flag semantics unresolved upstream. Resolved 2026-09-22 from the layer's FGDC
  metadata: X = Federal Minerals, I = Indian Minerals.
• Live service with no version: the snapshot date is the only edition marker. The metadata's
  pubDate 20260309 and idVersion 6.11(3.0.1) are a metadata-record date and the ArcGIS
  metadata-standard version respectively, and are not data editions.

Related

#486 BLM MLRS mineral case records · #451 BLM oil & gas leases

[cassiebuhler]

Scoping resolved: flag semantics, membership rule, and three fields that are not usable

All verified 2026-09-22 against the live service.

X / I are documented by BLM, so the blocker is closed

The FGDC metadata attached to the layer carries an enumerated domain for every commodity flag:

GET https://gis.blm.gov/utarcgis/rest/services/Lands/BLM_Utah_Federal_Minerals_Map_Service/FeatureServer/11/metadata

<attr><attrlabl>Coal</attrlabl>
  <attrdef>The Federal Government has all subsurface mineral rights to Coal Reservation
    Enumerated Domain Value: X
    Enumerated Domain Value Definition: Federal Minerals
    Enumerated Domain Value: I
    Enumerated Domain Value Definition: Indian Minerals"</attrdef></attr>

• X = Federal Minerals
• I = Indian Minerals

Identical domain on all ten flags. Unknown_ is defined as "Reservations unknown". This is a BLM
source, so table:columns can state it rather than record it as unresolved.

Membership rule, derived from counts

A commodity view selects flag IN ('X','I'). Empty string is not selected. Per-flag counts against
layer 11 reproduce every view count exactly:

flag	view	X	I	X+I	''	not-null
ALL_MIN	91,342	86,271	5,071	91,342	6	91,348
Oil_Gas	5,838	4,131	1,707	5,838	1	5,839
Coal	4,041	3,982	59	4,041	0	4,041
Oil_Shale	2,282	692	1,590	2,282	0	2,282
Gilsonite	174	174	0	174	0	174
Potash_Pot	781	781	0	781	0	781
Sodium	707	707	0	707	0	707
Phosphate	652	632	20	652	0	652
Geo_Steam	313	313	0	313	0	313
Unknown_	314	314	0	314	16	330

ALL_MIN and Unknown_ carry empty strings that are excluded upstream. Staging normalises '' to
null so that "flag is not null" is exactly the upstream view membership, which is what the
acceptance criterion tests. Flag values are also whitespace-stripped (the columns are char(2)).

Three fields listed in the scope are not usable, and are dropped

field	why
CreatedByRecord, RetiredByRecord	0 of 101,585 rows populated. Metadata defines both as "Not being used".
VALIDATIONSTATUS	constant 2 across all 101,585 rows, so it carries no information.

Also dropped: CREATE_DATE / MODIFY_DATE / CREATE_BY / MODIFY_BY and the
created_* / last_edited_* pairs. The metadata defines CREATE_DATE and MODIFY_DATE as
"Unknown", the stored values are a 1900 sentinel (-2209158986000), and every created_date is the
same bulk-migration timestamp. Publishing any of them invites reading a record-management artifact
as an edition date.

Columns retained: GlobalID, Serial_NR, Patent_NR, County, Admin, GCDBDIVID,
Section_, GIS_Acres, plus the ten flags. GlobalID is kept over OBJECTID as the stable
upstream identifier.

Licence evidence is stronger than assumed

The metadata states the constraint directly, so the SPDX public-domain claim does not rest on an
inference from the generic BLM disclaimer:

Access Constraints: None, these data are considered public domain.

Credit string: Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Utah State Office. Note the service-level
copyrightText differs slightly: Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management, Utah State Office.

Edition, restated

The metadata carries pubDate 20260309 and idVersion 6.11(3.0.1). Neither is a data edition:
idVersion is the ArcGIS metadata-standard version and pubDate is when the metadata record was
published. The snapshot access date 2026-09-22 remains the only edition marker, per the scope above.

Data-quality notes to carry into the STAC, not to fix

• County holds 30 Utah counties plus Tribal plus one leaked GCDB identifier
  (UT260040S0040W0SN190, 1 row). Values are published verbatim.
• Admin takes 15 values (BLM, BIA, Federal, Private, STATE, Tribal, NPS, USFWS,
  DOD, BR, SL&F, UDOT, UDWR, USP, WD).

[cassiebuhler]

Built and published — PR #710

s3://public-blm/utah-federal-mineral-estate, snapshot accessed 2026-09-22.

asset	size
utah-federal-mineral-estate.parquet	18,380,724 B (101,585 parcels)
utah-federal-mineral-estate.pmtiles	46,482,465 B
utah-federal-mineral-estate/hex/h0=*/data_0.parquet	2 partitions, 1,375,094 rows
stac-collection.json + README.md	published, registered as a child of public-blm

Build ran clean in 6m51s: stage-raw 2m24s, convert 4m7s, pmtiles 51s, hex 103s (102/102
completions, zero pod failures), repartition 22s.

Acceptance criteria

• One row per parcel (101,585 from layer 11), not the ten commodity views concatenated.
  COUNT(*) = COUNT(DISTINCT _cng_fid) = COUNT(DISTINCT GlobalID) = 101,585.
• All ten commodity flag columns present; 3,247 parcels carry more than one flag and appear once.
• Per-flag counts reproduce the upstream layer counts. Asserted in the stage-raw job and
  re-measured on the published parquet: ALL_MIN 91,342, Oil_Gas 5,838, Coal 4,041,
  Oil_Shale 2,282, Gilsonite 174, Potash_Pot 781, Sodium 707, Phosphate 652,
  Geo_Steam 313, Unknown_ 314. Only X and I present.
• X = Federal Minerals / I = Indian Minerals documented in table:columns, cited to the
  layer's FGDC metadata. '' folded to null so "not null" equals upstream view membership.
• Reprojected EPSG:26912 to EPSG:4326. Measured bbox -114.0529, 36.9977, -109.0416, 42.0015,
  which is Utah exactly.
• Access date 2026-09-22, staged raw path, size (117,231,722 B) and sha256
  1636cf7c7bec6d9d796193cea6614e6cfedcfe377f1a8f00ec2191f795f7ec5a in the STAC. Checksum
  recomputed from the object by a separate job, not transcribed.
• h3:native_resolution = 9, h3:parent_resolutions = [8, 0].
• SPDX public-domain + {"rel": "license"} link.
• table:columns populated on the GeoParquet, hex and PMTiles assets;
  scripts/verify-stac.py --bucket public-blm --dataset utah-federal-mineral-estate exits 0.

Two things that differ from the scope as written

Three listed fields were dropped (CreatedByRecord, RetiredByRecord, VALIDATIONSTATUS),
along with every date and user field. Detail in the scoping comment above; the short version is
that the first two are populated on 0 of 101,585 rows, the third is constant, and the dates are a
1900 sentinel or a single bulk-migration timestamp.

Bucket. As the issue anticipated, this is the only state-scoped dataset in public-blm. It
was published there for consistency with the other 13 BLM layers, and it reads naturally as a BLM
Utah State Office product rather than as a Utah dataset. Worth revisiting only if more
state-scoped BLM layers arrive.

Data-quality notes, published as the source records them

• Section_ valid PLSS sections 1 to 36 cover 100,908 parcels; 97/98/99 (251) and 0 (3) are
  out-of-grid placeholders; 423 null.
• County holds all 29 Utah counties plus Tribal, the case variant Box Elder, and one leaked
  survey identifier UT260040S0040W0SN190 (1 parcel).
• Admin spells the federal value both Federal (88,954) and FEDERAL (20).
• One parcel has no geometry upstream. It is in the GeoParquet with a null geometry and absent
  from the PMTiles and the hex, so the hex covers 101,584 parcels. Documented in the hex asset.
• 12,183 parcels carry a commodity flag under surface administered by someone other than the
  federal government or the BLM, which is the split-estate case the dataset exists to show.