Minnesota Parcel Data Provides Great Benefits

Parcel datasets are land records that define boundaries and ownership. They typically include various tax-related attributes, such as land values and property details. 

County governments produce the parcel datasets (except for federal and state-owned lands). 

Parcel data is one of the most foundational building blocks of spatial data. Its primary use is for tax administration and collection. In addition, it is an essential layer for a myriad of purposes, including land use studies, zoning, utilities, real estate, and base maps.  

Geospatial data produced by county governments may be chiefly intended for local use. Yet many aspects of our environment (e.g., climate and pollution) or infrastructure (e.g., transportation networks) do not end at county borders. When local data layers are collected and stitched together into statewide layers, their value is enhanced by allowing large-scale observations, decisions, and cooperative discussions both within and between organizations.

The Minnesota Geospatial Advisory Council (GAC)’s Parcels and Land Records Committee has pushed for the creation of a free and open standardized parcel dataset that covers the state. The committee has assembled  a single parcel  dataset from Minnesota counties that have opted-in to this project thus far. This statewide dataset uses the GAC Standard for Parcel Data.

Below is a map displaying which counties, at the time of most recent update to this story map, have opted into the GAC parcel dataset. Non-participating counties may still make their parcel data publicly accessible, however, only on a county scale.

Click on a county to view a pop-up which hosts the link to the download page for that county.

Brian Huberty, President of MFA —

Since 1876, the Minnesota Forestry Association (MFA) continues to promote and support healthy forests for all of Minnesota. Geospatial information is an essential tool to build woodland stewardship plans for woodland owners to visualize and monitor their forests through time.

Woodland owners need to know where their parcels lie on the landscape, as well as their neighbors, in order to better manage their forests across the watersheds.  The statewide parcel layer is an essential layer for our plan to build woodland stewardship plan templates for every woodland parcel across the state.

Note: It is estimated there are about 200,000 private, non-industrial woodland owners across Minnesota -- nearly three times the number of farmers in the state.

"Today with climate change, it is even more important for MFA to connect with all woodland owners [with the help of parcel data] to better support forest management practices for better economic and environmental outcomes in the future." Brian Huberty, MFA

Daniel Raleigh, Minnesota IT (MNIT) Services Wildlife Business Services —

Minnesota IT (MNIT) Services Wildlife Business Services staff partner with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (MNDNR) Wildlife Health Program (WHP) to assess and manage the spread of Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) in the white-tailed deer population of Minnesota.

Prior to the start of deer firearms opener, parcel data provided by the Minnesota Geospatial Office (MnGeo) are collected for specific counties under surveillance for spread of CWD which may include more than 1 million parcels for the annual project. The owner or tax name, address, state, and zip code information are manually parsed into new columns to streamline data organization. Once the data standardization has been completed, the parcels are dissolved according to name and address information to economize the number of polygons in the dataset. WHP staff contact landowners in areas where CWD has been detected in wild deer herds to inform them about CWD management activities in their area.

Current, accurate parcel attributes and boundaries are important to staff at MNDNR to ensure that personnel operate within approved property boundaries while conducting efforts to manage and reduce the spread of CWD in Minnesota.

Anish Holla and Chris Brueske, Minnesota Department of Health’s COVID Data Coordination Team — 

We are interested in parcel data to understand the housing types in urban areas. Identifying single family homes, apartment blocks etc. to plan vaccination clinics. Also, in future this data will be helpful in planning public health outreach. Currently we are working with parcel data for the metro region (7 counties), [a] couple of challenges we are facing are there is no standard defined for land use classification (Parcel Data Standard), so we are trying to develop a [solution] for that.

Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) biological monitoring field staff use the Open Counties Parcel data to identify landowners and land ownership on their tablets prior to visiting sites. Many stream monitoring efforts are a collaboration between landowners and state employees, establishing and maintaining monitoring sites requires fostering these relationships.

As the MPCA mentions below, they battle contamination sites in watersheds. Below are the mapped regions of the St. Louis River and the parcels they come into contact with. These parcels are not the only parcels that could be impacted by a contamination in the river, so as the MPCA has to address potential parcels impacted by the radius of contamination, knowing the land type and ownership of those parcels becomes very important.

Small creeks or other waterbodies may exist entirely within a county's borders, but some, like the St. Louis or Mississippi Rivers, pay no mind to these borders and span multiple counties. For the St. Louis River, the MPCA has access to both Carlton and St. Louis County parcel data, making contamination remediation efforts easier. If one of these counties parcel data were missing from this dataset, it would take more time gathering land records and land use data since multiple data sources would need to be used. This is time that, especially in the context of water pollution, is extremely valuable.

“The Remediation Division uses parcel data in nearly every aspect of our work to identify property owners near potential or known contaminated sites. A comprehensive, statewide parcel dataset would expedite the work of Remediation staff in reaching property owners in order to ensure the safety and wellbeing of Minnesota’s residents.” Anne Morris, Research Analyst | Natalie Brown, GIS Analyst - MPCA Remediations

The University of Minnesota -  Minnesota Design Center  initiative,  Design for Community Regeneration (D4CR) , partners with communities in a process of imagining and planning their regenerative and resilient future addressing food, water, and energy security while increasing economic opportunities, social cohesion, and finding low-cost housing options. Communities participate in a ground-up "GeoDesign" process assisted by geographic data (i.e. parcel and infrastructure data), and a dashboard for community goals. 

Envisioning research such as D4CR relies on access to public data such as parcels, and can only scale up when the methodologies have access to consistent data in all communities. Projects such as these engage the public, provide in-depth planning, and leverage community data in a way that an individual community may not have the resources to accomplish.

The image to the left shows the interactive web viewer used in Discover, Dream, and Decide Workshops in Warren MN.

Flooding is the most significant and costly natural hazard in Minnesota. Minnesota Homeland Security and Emergency Management (HSEM) has encouraged a potential risk and economic loss analysis for a 1% Annual Chance Flood for every Hazard Mitigation Plan in Minnesota. Potential economic loss estimates are based on county-specific building value data in order to provide realistic results. The economic loss model includes building valuations, occupancy class, square footage, year built, and number of stories. These data are collected by parcels for every county in Minnesota. Assumptions must be made in any county where these data cannot be made available for the plan, and the quality of these data limit the value of the estimated economic loss outputs for the community.

The sum of losses is aggregated to census blocks for the purpose of visualization. An overview of these results is in the map below.

A Collaboration between Ecolibrium3, the City of Duluth, and the Great Plains Institute (GPI) resulted in the  DuluthShines! Application , which allows residents and businesses to see how much rooftop solar energy could be produced on their buildings. The map works with a MN DNR calculator that demonstrates solar installation costs, energy generated, incentives available, and return on investment. This project has been in use since 2016. Ownership type, combined with zoning policies and building footprint data, allow solar PV planning in an intuitive way.

The development of this resource used parcel attributes such as lot size, building occupancy, and city zoning data to allow the user to explore their property for solar panel siting. Complete, comprehensive, and open county parcel data streamlines this process by allowing easy access to the necessary data. Should similar programs begin or expand into other counties, it would be a necessity to have easy access to this parcel data in order to better serve residents and state sustainability initiatives.

Mike Robinson, Department of Transportation (DOT) —

"Our use-case with regards to Rail Safety has to do with special traffic counts we have been performing via consultants (~ 1,000 locations). We have been getting feedback from local road authorities as to why we are counting locations with single residential properties. The reality is this has to do with a number of risk factors related to the safety of the crossing, however it would be useful to know how many unique properties are serviced by highway segments with railroad crossings."

The map below features what Mike Robinson talks about. How rail routes cross county borders and run through hundreds and thousands of parcels, and it is valuable to be able to know the details of the parcels underneath.

A spotlight on projects that would benefit from an open statewide parcel dataset.

The Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED), in partnership with MnGeo, has been provided chances to challenge the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Data on Broadband Serviceable Locations. These challenges, in most cases, would be correcting discrepancies between state data and FCC data to prove that there are more locations that need broadband than there currently are according to the FCC.

Submitting a successful challenge could lead to increased funding for broadband infrastructure. However, submitting a successful challenge is difficult. Many data are needed in order to verify a location that either should have or does have broadband; parcel data among them. Part of the GAC Standard is a record of each parcel's land use, and this is what would be useful for DEED and MnGeo when evaluating potential broadband serviceable locations (BSLs).

In this project, multiple benefits would come from a statewide parcel dataset:

• Ease of comparison across data (FCC vs State)
• Saves time and labor
• Each county providing land use information in their parcel data provides clarity to whether a parcel is used for commercial, residential, or agricultural, or mixed purpose.
  • The FCC considers many commercial locations, such as Best Buy Headquarters, to be a non-BSL since they subscribe to enterprise broadband, not mass-market providers.

Across the border in Wisconsin, tremendous conservation efforts have been happening, and thanks in large part to open parcel data. Mike Koutnik, board member of  Gathering Waters , detailed the benefits provided by open parcel data in the Non-Profit's project to work with Landmark Conservancy.

In the organization's collaboration, an easy-to-use dashboard was created that allows the user to evaluate and interact with climate resiliency within areas of Wisconsin. Simply, the dashboard displays which parcels pass the climate resiliency criteria. This project has allowed for greater land trust outreach to landowners and provided landowners with opportunities to act as better land stewards and conservators.

"[Landmark Conservancy] needed to be proactive about identifying and reaching out to landowners of high-quality lands, many who may not even be aware of land trusts, nor who were looking to protect their lands.  Much of land trust work is based on learning about potential protection opportunities in engaging with the community, and people reaching out to the trust directly." Mike Koutnik

The parcels provided the project with an intuitive visual land breakdown as well as allowing them to work more directly with the respective communities. This project didn't have to worry about county parcel data that lacked landowner information, or even about counties missing parcel data entirely, thanks to Wisconsin's statewide parcel dataset.

While similar efforts are happening in Minnesota, this case of what can be achieved with a statewide parcel dataset proves value beyond government use. Nonprofits like Gathering Waters advancing conservation efforts only heads the list of potential uses of a statewide parcel dataset.

Organizations that make this collection and publication of parcel data possible --

The purpose of  this standard  is to provide a single, efficient, and commonly accepted set of attribute specifications (field name, type, field width, and order) for transferring and compiling parcel data in Minnesota. The standard is primarily intended for use as a transfer standard; however, the wide range of attributes it contains facilitates its use for a variety of purposes. 

The parcel standard is stakeholder-defined. The standard does not mandate how data producers should capture or store their parcel data internally or how data is used to meet their internal business needs. The standard simply includes and describes parcel data attributes. It does not direct which GIS format or projection system is to be used.

The GAC hosts an FAQ  document here  that addresses more details on the standard.

Not at this time. Many, but not all, counties share their data on county websites.  The Minnesota Geospatial Information Office (MnGeo) does collect parcel data from every county, compiles the data together into one dataset using a common coordinate system and set of fields, and shares it with Minnesota state agencies. One reason for doing this work is to reduce the number of requests to the county for the same data. MnGeo does not share the compiled data publicly unless the county has opted-in to the public parcel dataset.  

The Minnesota Geospatial Advisory Council (GAC)’s Parcels and Land Records Committee has advocated for the creation of a free and open standardized parcel dataset that covers the state. The committee has assembled a  single dataset  containing all the parcels from counties that have opted-in to this project thus far. In other words, this dataset is the closest available dataset to a statewide parcel dataset. This compiled dataset uses the GAC Standard for Parcel Data. 

Yes! Both Wisconsin and North Dakota offer free and open statewide parcel datasets. 

• Wisconsin provides current statewide parcel data with an interactive map and  downloadable geodatabases .
  • The Statewide Parcel Map Initiative was established by Wisconsin Act 20, the biennial state of Wisconsin budget for 2013-2015. This act requires counties to submit parcel datasets online in a standardized format and provides funding directly to counties to improve their parcel mapping. 
  • Historical parcel datasets from 2014 onward can also be  downloaded  as geodatabases or shapefiles. 

• North Dakota provides current statewide parcel data as a web service with  downloadable geodatabases .  
  • The North Dakota State Parcel Program began with the 2021-2023 Biennium budget. This provided funding from the state legislature to collect, maintain, and publish a statewide parcel dataset. 
  • Only the most recently updated version is available through the Open Data Hub.