The community footprints for the CYR REA were produced by digitally tracing the built areas from satellite imagery. This was done to represent the actual community footprints more accurately than would have been possible from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing (TIGER) files. TIGER files are geospatial files with information on several political and administrative units. These shapefiles include polygon boundaries of geographic areas and features, linear features including roads and hydrography, and point features. The communities in Alaska were released as a polygon shapefile, with each community’s boundary identified. However, there were two major concerns with this file: i. Community [...]
