Twin Cities Historical Surface Waters Based on Original Public Land Survey Maps, 1848 - 1858

Scanned maps from the original public land survey of the Twin Cities were downloaded from Minnesota IT Services Geospatial Information Office (http://www.mngeo.state.mn.us/chouse/GLO/ ). These georeferenced images of 1:24000 maps were provided in the NAD 1983 geographic coordinate system (EPSG:4269). Researchers and staff from the University of Minnesota digitzed features related to streams, lakes, and wetlands in ArcMap using the "Create Features" tool in the editor toolbar. The digitized layers for each type of water feature were merged together, converted into shapefiles, and reprojected into the WGS 1984 Web Mercator Auxiliary Sphere projection (EPSG: 3857).