This data set shows the national forest and ranger district boundaries in Montana, and national forest land that is outside the forest boundaries. It does not distinguish among federal, state, and private lands that are inside the forest boundaries. For actual land ownership, see http://nris.mt.gov/nsdi/nris/ab105.html.
In the Arc/Info coverage version of this data, National forests are represented by a 'region.forest' feature class and ranger districts by a 'region.district' feature class. In the shapefile version, each polygon has a field for the forest and district name and attributes of the districts in its attribute table, and there is an additional table called forests.dbf that contains information about the forests.
These data are extracted from the statewide land ownership and managed areas layer (stew) maintained by the MTNHP.
Note that these data do not conform entirely with official national forest boundaries: (1) the boundaries included here have been expanded to encompass national forest system lands that lie outside of the official forest boundary and (2) many small and discrete polygons that have no national forest ownership but were (and are) included in the officially designated forest boundary are not included in these data.
