Handling CadNSDI's PLSSConflictedAreas in a fabric

[DavidBollinger]

The default tools that ship with the Land Survey Editing don't deal with the conflicted areas polygons, so I'm wondering if and how to represent them in the fabric.  We'll be doing county-wide adjustments against local control, so I'd want them to be adjusted along with the rest of the survey data.

Truthfully, they don't get used much, and are really just "metadata" functionally, but for consistency it would seem I'd want them in the fabric just so that they can be properly published back out in post-adjusted form (so as to still match everything else post-adjustment).

If kept inside the fabric..  my initial thought was to add another type to the lrSpecialSurveyType domain, similar to how meandered water is handled, and just load them there.  Then modify the publishing script so that 1) conflicted areas, 2) meandered water, and 3) everything else are all properly sorted out during publishing from the type=4 special surveys in the fabric.

Anything wrong with that approach?  The lack of a pre-existing domain value (and absence from the publishing script) makes me wonder if conflicted areas were either 1) not yet accounted for in the model, or 2) considered, but not expected to be inside the fabric.

If kept outside the fabric, and just "brought along" with adjustments... my concern would be that I don't know the CadNSDI data model well enough to know if conflicted area boundaries are allowed to be "unique" (ie, not represented by any other feature) in which case you'd definitely need them in the fabric to get a full/proper export of all PLSSPoints and PLSSIntersectedAreas.

Perhaps a simpler way to word that secondary question might be:  could conflicted areas be ignored ENTIRELY without affecting the validity of publishing?

Thanks.

[LucasBeauchamp]

Hello David,

I can only give my recommendation here as I'm not familiar with the CA CadNSDI and each state is handling conflicted features a little differently but in our parcel fabric where we edit and update PLSS data before we create our quarterly CadNSDI Publication we treat conflicted areas as an attribute on other PLSS parcels (the fields Conflict Code and Conflict Comment that exist in the conflicted features are a global attribute on the parcel fabric parcels layer so our CadNSDI Creation tool will take any feature with a conflict code of 'C' and export it as a conflicted feature). So for the majority of areas you should have a PLSS parcel for every conflicted area parcel. However gaps in the PLSS (legitimate on the ground survey gaps, not gis created ones) on our side are treated as Unsurveyed Unprotracted Townships with no name or identifiers and marked as a gap conflict, but in the creation of the CadNSDI these features are only represented in the conflicted features (not in townships). To my knowledge that is the only situation where there won't be a PLSS parcel for a conflicted features polygon. 

So my recommendation would be to work backwards and add similar fields in parcels FC and populate that data over and ignore those gaps in the PLSS. At least this way the attribute would carry through in your publication. Or you could modify the publication tool to export conflict features as well.

So for your idea of ignoring them completely, you will have the problem of there being no township polygons. Further, you will lose the conflict marking which could be meaningful to people working in that area. Areas are marked as conflict when gaps, overlaps, or survey problems are found so if it's been marked as a conflict someone made an effort to mark it that way. Currently the conflict notations are perhaps not as helpful or explanative as they could be though.

We have recently been discussing the potential to change some things about conflicted features with the potential for including a domain of conflict types as part of the CadNSDI standard, however these are still ongoing discussions. Therefore there may be changes coming down the line to how conflicted features are handled.

Lucas Beauchamp

lbeauchamp@blm.gov

Land Surveyor, CadNSDI

Cadastral Survey Office Section

BLM, Nevada State Office