This READ ME file contains further detailed information regarding: A) The most recent updates to wetlands per county. B) Usage notes. C) The size (in bytes) of uncompressed ARC/INFO interchange files by county for regulatory freshwater wetlands. D) Related files and coverages A) The following details the most recent updates to wetlands coverages by county: Albany 05/22/2002 Allegany 12/16/1994 Bronx 05/23/1995 Broome 12/16/1994 Cattaraugus 12/16/1994 Cayuga 12/16/1994 Chautauqua 12/16/1994 Chemung 12/16/1994 Chenango 09/30/2009 Clinton 03/06/1998 Columbia 03/05/2013 (see Usage Note 25 below) Cortland 12/16/1994 Delaware 11/28/2001 Dutchess 04/26/2006 Erie 02/22/2012 (see Usage Note 22 below) Essex No Coverage (county entirely within Adirondack Park) Franklin 02/02/1998 Fulton 12/16/1994 Genesee 01/06/1998 Greene 11/30/2011 (see Usage Note 27 below) Hamilton No Coverage (county entirely within Adirondack Park) Herkimer 08/22/1996 Jefferson 11/14/2012 Kings 05/23/1995 Lewis 02/02/1998 Livingston 12/16/1994 Madison 12/16/1994 Monroe 09/24/2008 (see Usage Note 21 below) Montgomery 02/17/1998 Nassau 08/28/2013 New York No Coverage (no NYS Regulatory Freshwater Wetlands in this county) Niagara 10/19/2011 Oneida 03/08/1995 Onondaga 12/15/2010 (see Usage Note 23 below) Ontario 02/09/2011 (see Usage Note 24 below) Orange 03/09/2011 Orleans 12/16/1994 Oswego 03/06/1998 Otsego 12/16/1994 Putnam 04/26/2006 Queens 09/27/1995 Rensselaer 03/05/2013 (see Usage Note 26 below) Richmond 05/23/1995 Rockland 02/02/1998 Saratoga 04/28/1999 (see Usage Note 19 below) Schenectady 11/06/1995 Schoharie 11/28/2001 Schuyler 12/16/1994 Seneca 01/09/2008 (see Usage Note 20 below) Steuben 12/16/1994 St. Lawrence 01/09/1998 Suffolk 07/03/2013 (see Usage Note 28 below) Sullivan 11/28/2001 Tioga 12/16/1994 Tompkins 12/16/1994 Ulster 06/17/2009 Warren 10/26/2001 Washington 03/14/1995 Wayne 04/19/1996 Westchester 07/28/2004 Wyoming 12/16/1994 Yates 12/16/1994 B) Usage Notes 1. The digital maps are NOT the official maps. While considerable effort has been made to ensure that the digital maps are an accurate representation of the official maps, they should be used with an awareness of the possibility of error. 2. DEC publishes documentation that can be used in interpreting the regulatory freshwater maps. This documentation should be consulted by users of the digital maps. 3. Wetland lines indicate "the approximate location of the actual boundaries of the wetlands" (ECL 24-0301(3)). For a final determination of the actual location of a wetland it is necessary to contact the DEC office for the region in which the wetland occurs. 4. The wetland coverage contains both polygon and arc information. In order to see all regulated wetlands and attributes, ArcView users must use the data as both polygon and arc themes. Failure to use an arc theme will result in some wetlands not appearing. 5. In contrast to the official maps, which use the 7.5 minute quad within a county as the unit of mapping, digital coverages are maintained with an entire county as the unit of mapping. 6. These coverages contain only those wetlands regulated by the New York State Freshwater Wetlands Act outside the Adirondack Park. The coverages do not necessarily contain wetlands regulated by other jurisdictions or unregulated wetlands, nor do they contain tidal wetlands regulated by New York State under the Tidal Wetlands Act (ECL Article 25). For information on other wetlands appropriate agencies such as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Adirondack Park Agency or local governments should be consulted. 7. Errors in the regulatory maps, such as mismatches along quad borders or duplicate wetlands identification codes are digitized faithfully. A list of errors is maintained by the Habitat Inventory Unit. 8. The asterisk that is used to denote an extended adjacent area is part of the wetland ID and must be used when selecting on WETID. Alternatively a "contain" or "like" operator (e.g. CN) can be used when selecting on WETID. 9. The Habitat Inventory Unit maintains documentation on the digitizing of each map sheet, specific procedures for developing a county wetlands coverage, and procedures for maintaining map accuracy. 10. Each coverage contains a cover.DOC INFO file that has additional information about the coverage's history. See Related Files and Coverages for more information. 11. Each coverage contains a title block in level 2 annotation that gives information about the completion date of the coverage and the most recent official amendment incorporated into the coverage. 12. Counties partially within the Adirondack Park have a level 3 annotation with a referral to the Adirondack Park Agency. This annotation appears in most quads that are partially within the Park. 13. Wetland ID annotation should be used in conjunction with separate annotation coverages for Clinton, Erie, Onondaga, Richmond and Suffolk Counties. These coverages contain linework separating wetland polygons that are close together but have different wetland ID's. See Related Files and Coverages below for more information. 14. As a result of an amendment to the Freshwater Wetlands Act, Article 24 of the Environmental Conservation Law (Chapter 408 of Laws of 1987, effective 7/23/87), certain parcels within some Richmond County wetlands are not mapped. The precise boundaries of such parcels can not be shown due to the scale of the official maps. Wetlands with excluded parcels are indicated with a five pointed star inside a circle. This symbol is drawn using arcs in the annotation coverage for Richmond County. For further information, contact the New York City office of the Department of Environmental Conservation. 15. A coverage may contain a cover.AMEND file with the county's wetland amendment history. See Related Files and Coverages for more information. 16. Wetland size values in the items POLY-ACRES, REGU-ACRES, and WETL-ACRES were calculated with respect to the outside edge of the wetland boundaries as drawn on the official maps. DEC considers the outside of the lines drawn on the official maps to be the depiction of the approximate boundary. In contrast to the official maps where the lines have considerable width, the geographic information system lines digitized for the wetland boundaries have zero thickness. These digitized lines generally follow the center of the official map lines. The polygons forming the boundaries of wetlands on the GIS therefore under-represent the extent of regulated wetlands by one half the thickness of the lines drawn on the official maps. Area values in acres are determined by the GIS by adding the polygon AREA to the PERIMETER of the polygon multiplied by the average thickness of the line on the official maps. Totals in square meters are then converted to acres. Values in REGION-ACRES, when present, were determined by DEC regional staff. Beginning with the proposed Niagara County wetland amendments of March 3, 2010, the size of newly amended wetlands was no longer calculated to include the thickness of the wetland boundary on the official maps, but was instead calculated strictly on the basis of the polygon AREA. 17. The New York Transverse Mercator (extended UTM zone 18) projection used for these coverages introduces some scale distortion to the calculation of wetland areas. Scale distortion is zero at the two standard lines, which pass through central Long Island and central Wayne County. Scale becomes increasingly small toward the zone's central meridian between the two standard lines and becomes larger toward the eastern and western extents of the state. Calculated areas are thus smaller than true area between the standard lines by a maximum of 0.08% (from the square of the maximum scale distortion of 0.9996), larger than true area at the eastern edge of Long Island by 0.08% (from the square of 1.0004), and larger than true area at the western edge of the state by 0.3% (from the square of 1.00145). These numbers are all well within the precision with which wetland boundaries are determined so no correction for scale factor distortion was made to acre values in the GIS coverages. Information on scale factors was derived from A Policy for Maintaining Uniform Scale on Digitally Plotted NYSDOT 1:24,000 Scale Quadrangles by William F. Johnson, NYS Department of Transportation, Albany, New York, 1990. 18. Different area measurements in the coverage PAT's have different meanings. Refer to the item definitions to make sure that area is being interpreted correctly. Neither REGU-ACRES nor WETL-ACRES include the area of linear wetlands. REGION-ACRES may include the area determined for linear wetlands. 19. The digital wetland boundary data for Saratoga County incorporates proposed amendments which became the official regulatory wetland boundaries as of April 28, 1999. The proposed amended boundaries are the official regulatory wetland boundaries. If you have any questions, please contact Judy Stevens, NYSDEC at 518-402-8849. 20. The digital wetland boundary data for Seneca County incorporates proposed amendments which became the official regulatory wetland boundaries as of January 9, 2008. The proposed amended boundaries are the official regulatory wetland boundaries. If you have any questions, please contact Judy Stevens, NYSDEC at 518-402-8849. 21. The digital wetland boundary data for Monroe County incorporates proposed amendments which became the official regulatory wetland boundaries as of September 24, 2008. The proposed amended boundaries are the official regulatory wetland boundaries. If you have any questions, please contact Judy Stevens, NYSDEC at 518-402-8849. 22. The digital wetland boundary data for Erie County incorporates seventeen proposed amendments which became the official regulatory wetland boundaries as of October 9, 2006 (wetland LA-17), February 22, 2010 (wetland LA-18), August 30, 2011 (wetlands LA-19 & TE-45), September 22, 2011 (wetlands CC-35, CC-45 & TW-30) and February 22, 2012 (wetlands BU-4a, BU-4b, BU-4c, BU-5, BU-9, BU-10, BU-11, BU-12, BU-13 & BU-17). The proposed amended boundaries are the official regulatory wetland boundaries. If you have any questions,please contact Judy Stevens, NYSDEC at 518-402-8849. 23. The digital wetland boundary data for Onondaga County incorporates the correction of a technical mapping error that appears on the official regulatory map for the boundary of wetland BRE-9 (not a remapping of the wetland). This correction was made to the data on December 15, 2010. If you have questions, please contact Judy Stevens, NYSDEC at 518-402-8849. 24. The digital wetland boundary data for Ontario County incorporates a proposed amendment (wetland VT-2) which became the official regulatory wetland boundary as of February 9, 2011. The proposed amended boundary is the official regulatory wetland boundary. If you have questions, please contact Judy Stevens, NYSDEC at 518-402-8849. 25. The digital wetland boundary data for Columbia County incorporates eight proposed amendments which became the official regulatory wetland boundaries as of November 30, 2011 (wetlands CL-30, CO-30, HS-23, CO-24,CO-10, CO-28 and CO-27) and March 5, 2013 (wetland CA-1).The proposed amended boundaries are the official regulatory wetland boundaries. If you have any questions, please contact Judy Stevens, NYSDEC at 518-402-8849. 26. The digital wetland boundary data for Rensselaer County incorporates six proposed amendments which became the official regulatory wetland boundaries as of November 30, 2011 (wetlands AP-30, HF-3, TO-15, AP-2,and TN-106) and March 5, 2013 (wetland CA-1). The proposed amended boundaries are the official regulatory wetland boundaries. If you have any questions, please contact Judy Stevens, NYSDEC at 518-402-8849. 27. The digital wetland boundary data for Greene County incorporates three proposed amendments which became the official regulatory wetland boundaries as of November 30, 2011 (wetlands HN-118, HN-119 and HN-101). The proposed amended boundaries are the official regulatory wetland boundaries. If you have any questions, please contact Judy Stevens, NYSDEC at 518-402-8849. 28. The digital wetland boundary data for Suffolk County incorporates the proposed addition of wetland R-82, which became the official regulatory wetland boundary as of October 3, 2012; and the proposed deletion of wetland MD-15, which became official as of July 3, 2013. The proposed amended boundaries are the official regulatory wetland boundaries. If you have any questions, please contact Judy Stevens, NYSDEC at 518-402-8849. C) The size of uncompressed ARC/INFO interchange files per county for regulatory freshwater wetlands: Albany 846862 Allegany 1074415 Bronx 27059 Broome 264048 Cattaraugus 1321793 Cayuga 2578480 Chautauqua 2301852 Chemung 119104 Chenango 740641 Clinton 2530097 (plus 29027 for associated ANNO coverage file) Columbia 2703163 Cortland 214227 Delaware 783284 Dutchess 5877127 Erie 2979493 (plus 12090 for associated ANNO coverage file) Essex No File (county entirely within Adirondack Park) Franklin 1572669 Fulton 643800 Genesee 1894606 Greene 1279423 Hamilton No File (county entirely within Adirondack Park) Herkimer 868678 Jefferson 6192179 Kings 12622 Lewis 6677413 Livingston 419210 Madison 791883 Monroe 1819586 Montgomery 1196524 Nassau 756293 (plus 7253 for associated ANNO coverage file) New York No File (no NYS Regulatory Freshwater Wetlands in this county) Niagara 1552915 Oneida 6770075 Onondaga 4543596 (plus 14309 for associated ANNO coverage file) Ontario 1777345 Orange 5024643 Orleans 497754 Oswego 12755333 Otsego 2007673 Putnam 2470130 Queens 96430 Rensselaer 1761766 Richmond 562430 (plus 107643 for associated ANNO coverage file) Rockland 266458 Saratoga 8132396 Schenectady 499688 Schoharie 634458 Schuyler 214836 Seneca 919003 Steuben 1518177 St. Lawrence 6442584 Suffolk 7426031 (plus 500728 for associated ANNO coverage file) Sullivan 1814861 Tioga 113057 Tompkins 506672 Ulster 2273285 Warren 308710 Washington 1707275 Wayne 2938038 Westchester 2332083 Wyoming 1344450 Yates 173581 D) Related files and coverages: 1. Each coverage contains a cover.DOC INFO file that contains information about the source of the coverage and the date on which it was digitized. Items in this file with non-obvious definitions are: DIG_PERSON - The names of the people with primary responsibility for the original automation of the coverage. DIG_DEVICE - The digitizer or software used to automate the coverage. FILE_DATE - The date on which the regulatory maps for the county were originally filed. AMEND_DATE - The filing date of the most recent official amendment in the county. This item is empty if no map amendments occurred in the county after the original filing. AMEND_HIST - A listing of all map amendment dates that are incorporated into digitized wetland coverages. Archive versions of these coverages are maintained by the Habitat Inventory Unit. Amendment dates that occurred before the first time a coverage was digitized are not listed. DATE_COMPLETE - The date on which the original coverage was completed. REVISE_DATES - The dates of coverage revisions associated with amendments. REVISIONS: Describes miscellaneous revisions to the coverage. 2. Any coverage for a county in which amendments have taken place contains a cover.AMEND INFO file. This file is a database of all amendments to each individual wetland and is sorted by the wetland identification code. Other fields contain the date of the amendment, the name of the quadrangle in which the wetland is located, the map number within the county, and the nature of the amendment. A relate can be used to link a WETID in a coverage PAT or AAT to WETID in the same county's cover.AMEND to determine the amendment history of the wetland. Note, however, that both the WETID and the QUADNAME are needed to uniquely determine an individual wetland because the same wetland identification code can label different wetlands in different quads within the same county. The cover.AMEND file can contain multiple records for each WETID because an individual wetland may have been amended more than once. It may also contain WETID's that do not appear in the coverage if amendments have removed a wetland from the official map. Coverages for counties that have not been amended since the initial filing do not have a cover.AMEND file. The cover.AMEND files are derived from a master INFO data file named WETAMEND. This file contains the entire amendments database. Item definitions for this file are: WETID - the alpha-numeric wetland identification code of the wetland affected by the amendment (a code of "VARIOUS" is used with the Clinton County amendment of March 9, 1994; see the AMENDTYPE item codes, below) COUNTY - the first four letters of the county in which the amendment occurred (Note: St. Lawrence County = STLA) AMENDDATE - the date of the amendment, entered numerically as mm/dd/yyyy, where m = month, d = day, y = year QUADNAME - the full name of the NYSDOT 7 1/2' quad map in which the amendment occurred MAPNUMBER - the map number of the affected quad, as given on the Freshwater Wetlands Regulatory Mapping Index for the county, and on the regulatory maps as "Map ... of ... "; a character item with single digit numbers right-justified AMENDTYPE - a code (or codes) to indicate the type of amendment involved: ADD = addition of a new wetland, which was not part of an existing regulated wetland ADD/NOT = addition of a wetland which appeared on the original filed map, but was considered unofficial due to notification discrepancies ADD/SEP = addition of a new wetland resulting from assignment of a new wetland identification code to a parcel or parcels separated from an existing regulated wetland (may not appear as a separate line on regulatory wetland map legends) DEL = deletion of a regulated wetland from the map, such that the parcel or parcels affected are no longer considered regulated wetlands DEL/COM = deletion of a wetland resulting from the combination of that wetland (or some remaining portion thereof) with another existing regulated wetland ADJ = an adjustment of the boundaries of a wetland, which may involve either an increase or decrease in area; this category includes boundary changes involving parcels gained from another wetland which has been deleted, or removed to create a wetland with a new identification code CLASS = a change in the class of an existing regulated wetland (this type of amendment, which does not appear on the wetland map legends, has only been included in the database beginning with the Dutchess County amendment of March 23, 1994) EXT = amendments involving extended adjacent areas of regulated wetlands (beyond the standard 100' buffer zone) VARIOUS = various types of amendments involved in the Clinton County amendment of March 9, 1994 (the changes involved in this countywide amendment were too numerous and complex to be listed individually by wetland ID; one record for each amended quadrangle was added to the file with a code of "VARIOUS" in AMENDTYPE and WETID items) LABEL = corrections to map labels (such as wetland ID or upland 'U' labels); does not include routine label changes associated with other types of amendments AMENDMENT - a description of the amendment GIS-ID - a unique number assigned to each wetland due to the duplication of the alpha-numeric wetland ID codes between counties 3. When the official maps contain lines indicating which wetland polygons belong to which wetland ID, the lines are contained in a separate coverage called XXXfwaan where XXX is the three-digit FIPS code of the county. Some other counties also have XXXfwaan coverages to aid in interpretation of the digital coverages. These coverages are used for Clinton, Erie, Nassau, Onondaga, Richmond and Suffolk Counties and should be considered an integral part of the wetland coverages. 4. Each county has a shapefile containing "check zones." These are 500 foot zones around wetland polygons and 200 foot zones around linear wetlands. Due to the approximate nature of the mapped wetland boundaries, NYSDEC recommends that if you are planning a project within the check zone, you should check with NYSDEC to determine if a wetlands permit is required. The check zone should not be confused with the regulated adjacent area (usually 100 feet, but sometimes more) surrounding a wetland.