Law
The rules laid over a place, as data: permits and environmental review, zoning, wetlands, flood zones and protected land.
Much of what a place looks like was decided on paper first. A field stays a field because it is zoned for one house per acre. A creek bank stays wild because it is a regulated wetland. A house with a government-backed mortgage inside a mapped flood zone must carry flood insurance that its neighbour across the line need not. A model of what could happen in a place has to carry these rules alongside the terrain. The rules layer describes the kinds.
This shelf holds the sources where those rules can be read as data rather than as documents. Most are from the United States so far. Most rules are still published as text, change over time, and are argued over, so every layer here is a snapshot of something contested.
FEMA's national GIS layer of official flood zones, including the high-risk areas under floodplain rules and the flood insurance purchase requirement
WaterWeather & climateCities & places open dataAPIclosed participation
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US Fish and Wildlife Service maps of the nation's wetlands and deepwater habitats by type and extent, viewable in the Wetlands Mapper and downloadable by state or watershed
WaterLiving systemsCities & places open dataAPIclosed participation
Map of what local zoning allows across the United States, district by district, built by the nonprofit Land Use Atlas from the text and maps of each zoning code
Cities & placesPeople & society closed sourceclosed datano APIpartly open participation
USGS inventory of US public lands and protected areas, with owner, manager, designation, public access and a code for how strongly each parcel is protected for biodiversity
Living systemsCities & places open sourceopen dataAPIpartly open participation
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Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's public data for US federal environmental review: a corpus of 188,000 NEPA documents with maps, and open-source tools that query live agency data
Cities & placesLiving systems open sourceopen dataAPIpartly open participation
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US Fish and Wildlife Service planning tool that lists the endangered species, critical habitat, wetlands and refuges on or near a drawn project area, with the critical habitat maps as downloads
Living systemsCities & places open dataAPIclosed participation