The Protected Lands data consists of six layers of mapped information that represent Federally-owned lands, lands owned by the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, county park lands, privately owned conservation lands, Maryland Environmental Trust easements, and Maryland Department of Agriculture easements. In some cases, DNR-owned lands include potential/planned acquisition areas (project boundaries) that are not actually in State or County ownership at this time.

Below is a key to the directory for the data:

plag: agricultural districts and easements
plcp: county parks
pldl: DNR-owned lands
plfl: federally-owned lands
plmt: Maryland Environmental Trust (MET) easements plpc: private conservation lands

The file names within each subdirectory use 8 characters. The first 2 characters identify the county code. The next 4 characters identify the file (uses the same convention as the subdirectory names). The 7th character identifies the coordinate system: a "7" indicates Maryland State Plane 1927, a "3" indicates Maryland State Plane 1983. The final character indicates the units: "F" for feet and "m" for meters.