Lorri A. Peltz and Marianne Hayes August
Many Federal, State, and local agencies use coordinates of the Public Land Survey System (PLSS) to describe the location of various features. This location description can be legally binding and, therefore, must be as accurate as possible. The U.S. Geological Survey publishes maps that show the PLSS coordinates; the accuracy depends on map scale and, thus, some maps may not be appropriate for local use. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management has currently released the Geographic Coordinates Data Base (GCDB) that contains PLSS data in latitude and longitude format. To evaluate accuracy of data in the GCDB, the PLSS coordinates from the 1:24,000-scale PLSS maps are compared with corresponding coordinates in the GCDB.