PLACES

The Private-Land Conservation Evidence System (PLACES) is a data synthesis platform for parcel data in the contiguous United States (CONUS).

PLACES connects geographic data on geospatial parcel boundaries, tax assessor records, and sales transactions. Parcel boundaries allow us to retrieve characteristics of land, buildings, land cover, and local demographics from public data sources, including Earth observation satellites (predictors). We use these rich datasets to explore a range of questions of interest to policy makers and conservation planners (see placeslab.org/research).

PLACES contains data on ownership, buildings, protection investments, infrastructure, demographics, geophysical characteristics, long-term land cover change, and other variables for more than 130 million parcels in more than 2,700 counties.

The software is built on top of Python’s extensive open-source ecosystem, namely geopandas, GDAL/OSGeo, and QGIS.

Boston University’s PLACES instance is deployed on the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center.

PLACES data has been used in several dozen peer-reviewed empirical analyses in the realm of conservation effectiveness, environmental policy, and environmental economics: list of publications.

Learn more about the software, data access, and research applications: placeslab.org/places