Making the Case for WhiteStar Parcels®
As the US economy slowly rumbles back to life, WhiteStar’s customers are resuming projects albeit in a very changed environment. When it comes to GIS resources and projects, you are likely wearing more hats and having fewer resources while facing an increasing workload. WhiteStar Parcels® is a quarterly compilation of the latest available parcel data for use in your projects. This month we will look at a few parcel data use cases.
The map below shows a buffered area of interest adjacent to the Kalama River in Washington State. Parcels have been labeled with the land owner’s name, acreage, and dollar value of any land improvements. We have also streamed WhiteStar Culture® building footprints layer into the project to show the location of vulnerable structures in the area. An ArcGIS web stream service provides quick access to this very large dataset, as opposed to having to download and subset the data manually. WhiteStar Parcels can then be used immediately to assess the financial insurance exposure of a hypothetical flood along the river, or for that matter anywhere in the United States. Many different attributes can be used to assess the potential financial exposure.
Forestry users alternatively could query the parcel data to determine current land ownership. Insurance companies can determine the value of existing improvements along a flood prone watercourse. Midstream pipeline companies can determine ownership and mailing addresses, within a buffer distance of their pipeline network. Oil and gas users can also use parcel data as a starting point for mapping geometries of their leases or to determine land ownership for purposes of land access.
WhiteStar offers a nationwide web streaming subscription of the WhiteStar Parcels that can be used in any project area of interest you may have across the country. This capability avoids data loading (you simply input the URL into your GIS software) and then play out “what if” scenarios without knowing a particular project area in advance. Our data is also different in that you can pull up parcel records by referencing township-range-section or abstract number in Texas. Each polygon is tagged with an amoddate or a gmoddate representing the last time that the parcel geometry or attributes were changed.
WhiteStar Parcels as of late May, 2020 consists of more than 150 million individual land polygons that are updated quarterly. Customers benefit from instant access and completely avoid the expenses related to data management, updating and cleaning. The latest and greatest data can be downloaded directly from WhiteStar Cloud in a variety of common GIS and CAD data formats or data subscriptions can additionally be configured into web streaming services for immediate use.
