There are four ways of navigating the map, all of which may be used at any time.

1. Draw a Rectangle: select Zoom Box under Map Tool. Click and drag a rectangle in the map view. The map view will then change to your specified area.

2. Navigation Buttons: clicking on the four blue buttons will immediately affect the map view. Full Extent changes the map view to show the entire state. Zoom + and Zoom - zoom by a factor of 2 from the center of the current view. Redraw Map refreshes the current map view.

3. Zoom to County: by selecting a county name from the drop-down box will then zoom to the county extent.

4. Directional Pan Buttons: clicking on any of the four pan buttons situated around the borders of the map will move the map view in that corresponding direction.

Identify and query corners
Having navigated to your area of interest, the Map Tool can be changed to allow identification of PLSS corners. To do this, click on the Identify Box. You are now ready to click and drag a rectangle in the map view to identify corners, or just click on a specific corner. Once you have identified the corners, the right side will display information about the points at that location. The selected corners will be highlighted in yellow in the map view.

Below the point information are two hyperlinks: the first, View Full Record, leads to more detailed corner and dataset information displayed in a new window. The second, Add to Results, adds the corner to a user-defined list that is maintained for your current session with PLSSFinder. Corners in this list are symbolized on the interactive map and remain selected until you leave the application.

To query or locate specific corners in a township and range, use the Zoom to box and select the desired township and range.

Printing
At any time you wish to print a PDF of the map image you're viewing, select the "Print Map" button located in the lower left corner of the map view.

To view your saved results, click on the button View Saved Results. This is where you can view the point records saved which can be exported as a delimited text file for use in other software.

For problems with…
•   Retrieving data
•   Missing data
•   Broken links, etc.

Contact: Brenda Hemstead at the State Cartographer's Office
(Phone) (608)263-4371, (fax) (608)262-5205
Email: hemstead@wisc.edu

Adding data to PLSSFinder is easy: simply provide, at minimum, the corner name/id, coordinates, heights, units, datums, accuracy (if available), and metadata (if possible).

The preferred formats at this time are ArcInfo shapefile (.shp), Microsoft Excel (.xls) or MS Access (.mdb), but Comma Separated Volumes (.csv), ASCII text (.txt), or dBASE (.dbf), are also acceptable. The data should be in a column/row layout with fields across the columns and individual records down the rows.

To either submit your data file or if additional assistance is needed, contact Brenda Hemstead at the State Cartographer's Office at (608)263-4371 or email at hemstead@wisc.edu.

Corner Name: unique corner name assigned by the contributor

Corner ID: unique corner ID assigned by the contributor

County: corner location

Corner Type: corner classification (meander corner, quarter corner, mile post, etc.)

Monument Type: material, composition of the physical corner marker

Township: number of townships, north or south

Range: number of columns of townships, east or west

Section: 1 of 36 section numbers within a township

Horizontal Coordinates & Datum:
- Easting & Northing Coordinates: projected coordinates assigned by the contributor as either county coordinates or state plane coordinates along with the reference datum.
- Geographic Longitude & Latitude Coordinates: latitudes are referenced as positive north and negative south; longitudes are referenced as positive east and negative west along with the reference datum as assigned by the contributor.

Horizontal & Vertical Accuracy:
- Horizontal Accuracy: The accuracy or reliability for the reported horizontal coordinate position.
- Vertical Accuracy: The accuracy or reliability for the reported elevation for the corner.

Heights:
- ellipsoid height: the height of an object above the *reference ellipsoid* in use. These days, this term is generally used to qualify an elevation as being measured from the ellipsoid as opposed to the geoid. GPS systems calculate ellipsoidal height. The geoid height at that location must be subtracted to obtain what is commonly referred to as the elevation.
- orthometric height: refers to the distance measured along the plumb line between the geoid and a point on the Earth's surface, taken positive upward from the geoid.

Comments: any additional information about the corner.

External Point Information: full url to more information (tie sheet, etc) for a particular corner

Dataset Metadata: URL to contributors metadata file fortheir dataset

Dataset Inventory: date the dataset was received from the contributor

Contacts: contact information for the contributor of the data