So, (with the help of some of the GIS people at the Fish and Boat Commission) I’ve discovered the Pennsylvania Spatial Data Access web site, where I can download all sorts of data that I think would look nice on the map.

I am especially interested in the state forest lands, but DCNR seems to be using some strange coordinate system to encode its data. here is a snippet from a shpdumped shapefile.

Shape:94 (Polygon) nVertices=11, nParts=1
Bounds:( 62023.688, 947584.250, 0, 0)
to ( 64166.531, 949746.063, 0, 0)
( 62759.394, 949746.063, 0, 0) Ring
( 64166.531, 948741.125, 0, 0)
( 64119.191, 948596.063, 0, 0)
( 64087.996, 948391.750, 0, 0)
( 64000.742, 948226.938, 0, 0)
( 63855.379, 948124.750, 0, 0)
( 63704.660, 947851.188, 0, 0)
( 63629.269, 947729.188, 0, 0)
( 63583.801, 947584.250, 0, 0)
( 62023.688, 948750.750, 0, 0)
( 62759.394, 949746.063, 0, 0)

Does anyone know what sort of coordinates these are? They certainly aren’t lat/lon pairs.

Update
This is what the projection file says. It doesn’t make any sense to me, but I’m a total newbie at this stuff.


PROJCS["USA_Contiguous_Lambert_Conformal_Conic",
GEOGCS["GCS_North_American_1983",
DATUM["D_North_American_1983",
SPHEROID["GRS_1980",6378137.0,298.257222101]],
PRIMEM["Greenwich",0.0],
UNIT["Degree",0.0174532925199433]],
PROJECTION["Lambert_Conformal_Conic"],
PARAMETER["False_Easting",0.0],
PARAMETER["False_Northing",0.0],
PARAMETER["Central_Meridian",-78.0],
PARAMETER["Standard_Parallel_1",40.25],
PARAMETER["Standard_Parallel_2",41.5],
PARAMETER["Latitude_Of_Origin",39.0],
UNIT["Foot",0.3048]]