Utah Government Land Ownership

Polygons are where land management gets political, and few datasets make that clearer than land ownership. Utah's government-owned land — federal BLM territory, National Parks, and Wilderness Areas, plus the state trust lands managed by SITLA — forms an intricate patchwork that shapes the state's geography, economy, and recreation every bit as much as its physical terrain does.

A style built to make polygons glow

The map uses John Nelson's "Firefly" style, built for exactly this kind of dense, overlapping polygon data — dark background, luminous edges — so ownership categories stay legible even where boundaries get complicated.

State trust lands make the patchwork

The state trust lands come straight from the Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration (SITLA), and their scattered sections are a big part of what gives the map its patchwork texture against the larger federal blocks. Rather than invent a new color scheme from scratch, the palette was matched to SITLA's own land ownership map, so this version reads as a companion to an already-authoritative reference rather than a competing one.

Created for the “Polygons” theme of the 2024 #30DayMapChallenge, using UGRC and SITLA land ownership data.