County Boundary Improvement Update
In 2021, the Arkansas GIS Office launched an initiative to leverage the highly accurate spatial measurements collected by the Land Survey Division through its statewide Public Land Survey System (PLSS) Corner Restoration Program. While the primary objective of this program is to restore and preserve the section, township, and range corner monuments that form the foundation of Arkansas’ Public Land Survey System, it also provides an opportunity to improve the positional accuracy of Arkansas county boundaries where those surveyed monuments define county lines.
The control points used to refine county boundaries are established through precision Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) field surveys with an accuracy of approximately one-half foot. The survey documentation and provenance supporting these updates are maintained within the Arkansas PLSS Corner Control Point database, available at https://gis.arkansas.gov/product/plss-corner-control-points/.
The Arkansas GIS Office tracks these improvements in a dataset named County Boundary Change. Each year, updates from newly surveyed PLSS corner monuments are evaluated, incorporated into the statewide County Boundary dataset where appropriate, and published alongside the corresponding County Boundary Change layer to document the revisions.
This publication includes 43 individual county boundary updates affecting the following counties:
Arkansas, Baxter, Chicot, Clark, Cleveland, Columbia, Crittenden, Cross, Desha, Drew, Garland, Grant, Hot Spring, Jackson, Jefferson, Johnson, Lee, Lincoln, Marion, Montgomery, Nevada, Newton, Perry, Polk, Saline, Scott, Searcy, Stone, Union, Woodruff, and Yell.
In conjunction with the county boundary updates, the Arkansas GIS Office is also publishing an update to the PLSS Corner Control Point dataset on behalf of the Land Survey Division. The dataset continues to expand as additional corners are surveyed, restored and documented throughout the state. Since last year’s publication, the dataset has grown by nearly 7,000 PLSS corner control points with documented high-precision coordinates, providing an increasingly robust foundation for cadastral mapping, land records, and geospatial data across Arkansas.
To view and/or download additional information regarding these datasets please see below.
