After watching that video I was thinking about all the tools I have for land research with public data and GIS tools 🗺

Most counties and states now publicly post tax maps and rolls. If I can connect to those REST Services then I can have fairly good idea of property lines, assessed value and taxes. Using R Studio I can easily calculate the assessed value per acre in an area or for similar properties.

Then then there is a lot I can find out about a property without ever even stepping foot on it. Aerial photography, especially the most-common leaf-less type taken either in April or November before the snow can show a lot about what conditions are like on the ground. It can give on an idea of what buildings exist there, what trees and pasture exist. What kind of logging practices have taken past in the recent past. In addition, most places now have a wide variety of historical aerial photos available. For most areas, you can easily get aerial photos from the 1950s and early 1960s, which can give you insight on whether or not the land was farmed in the recent past.

But maybe the next most interesting is the information one can obtain from LIDAR elevation data. In most cases, LIDAR survey data can show stone wells, gullies, potential wetlands and swamps, and old trash dumps above grade. Basically anything that is ground cover, that is not trees. If you download the full-point cloud data, you can get things like building and tree heights, which can give you more ideas on what trees are on the property and what is salable.

It’s actually quite remarkable what you can do with modern databases, some R code and GIS data to discover a lot about land that might in a few years back be unknowable without a detailed, on the ground property survey. I am fortunate to have so many resources available at my finger tips these days — recognizing though that other people also have access to data, though maybe others aren’t quite as talented when it comes to working with big data or sifting through GIS data.