The goal of mbquartR is to provide an easy way to download the
Manitoba Original Survey Legal Descriptions data from
DataMB and then to locate quarter
sections, and other land division types, in the province of Manitoba.
You can search by legal land description (e.g., NE-11-33-29W1) or by
lat/long coordinates (e.g., -101.4656, 51.81913). There is also a
convenient map function that plots the centres and outlines (polygons)
of the quarter sections on a map.
The Manitoba Original Survey Legal Descriptions data set covers the
entire province of Manitoba and there are over 900,000 parcels of land
that have a legal land description. mbquartR was created for those who
work with geospatial data in Manitoba, particularly those who are
working with rural or farm parcels of land where the legal land
description is commonly used as the method of identifying the location.
mbquartR also allows users to quickly go back and forth between
geographic coordinates and the legal land description. Most mapping
applications (e.g., Google Maps) can not find or route to a legal land
description, but you can with coordinates!
Checkout the mbquartR website for vignettes/code examples.
A quarter section in Manitoba is a land unit measuring 160 acres (~64.8 ha), representing a quarter of a square mile. It originates from the Dominion Land Survey system, introduced in the late 19th century to organize the European settlement and colonization of Western Canada. The grid system covers most of the province of Manitoba and organizes land into a hierarchy of quarter sections, sections, townships, and ranges.
The full list of quarter sections and coordinates are downloaded from DataMB. Note that occasionally this site is unavailable, in this situation an archived version of the data is downloaded from the package repository on GitHub.
You can install the development version of mbquartR like so:
install.packages("mbquartR", repos = "https://ropensci.r-universe.dev")
Location of the province of Manitoba and surrounding provinces and territories of Ontario (ON), Saskatchewan (SK), Nunavut (NU), and Northwest Territories (NT) within south-central Canada. Manitoban cities with a population greater than 10,000. Inset: Location of Manitoba within North America
Alex Koiter ([email protected]; @alex-koiter)
Brandon University
Department of Geography & Environment
Brandon, Manitoba
Canada
The data is publicly available through the DataMB, the province of Manitoba’s public open data platform. The usage of this data is subject to the OpenMB Information and Data Use License.
All suggestions are welcomed, big and small, on how to make this package more robust, functional, and user friendly. Please read the contributing guide to learn more.
Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this package development you agree to abide by its terms.
The logo features the outline of Manitoba with a stylized depiction of a one-square-mile section of land, divided into four equal quarter sections. One quarter section is highlighted, with its centre marked by a point. In the southwest (lower-left) corner of the province, a small green square and the label “SE-22-10-19W1” indicate the quarter section where Brandon University is located.