Although greatly reduced from its original size when it was created in 1864, Pima County still covers 9,184 square miles. That means that Pima County is larger in area than the states of New Jersey or New Hampshire, and is also larger than the states of Delaware, Connecticut, and Rhode Island combined. The elevation in Pima County ranges from 1,200 feet to the 9,185 foot peak of Mount Lemmon. The San Xavier, Pasqua Yaqui and Tohono O'odham nations together account for ownership of 42.1 percent of county lands. The State of Arizona owns 14.9 percent; the U.S. Forest Service (including the Coronado National Forest) and Bureau of Land Management, 12.1 percent; other public lands occupy 17.1 percent of the county, and individual or corporate ownership accounts for 13.8 percent. (These figures are from the Arizona Department of Commerce.)
The creation of new datasets, maintenance of existing datasets, and management of datasets from other sources is an ongoing duty of the Pima County Geographic Information Systems area. Because of the large size of our county, some of our more complex datasets can become daunting tasks to create and maintain. The largest and most complex of the Pima County GIS datasets is the Parcel layer. This data layer contains over 423,000 parcels (polygons). Each one of those parcels has 73 attribute items. (Statistics as of 6/2007).
The GIS Library includes over 1439 GIS layers.
A GIS Library Overview slide presentation by Steve Whitney explains the library and its uses. It was presented at our GIS Brown Bag seminar series on January 15, 2002.