What is the coordinate system of the NMCRIS spatial data?

NMCRIS coordinate system

As part of the 2010-2011 upgrades to NMCRIS, all coordinate data were migrated to NAD-83 UTM. Please be aware of the Zone 12/Zone 13 issue affecting statewide data in New Mexico. The map service is projected into NAD-83 UTM Zone 13 across the entire state. However, the activity and resource summary reports will display Zone 12 coordinates where appropriate. For example, the resource summary report (.pdf) for the Silver City Historic District lists the centerpoint coordinates as UTM Zone 12 755004 E, 3629401 N. However, if a user hovers his mouse over the Silver City Historic District the dynamic coordinates at the bottom of the screen will read 192968, 3630875. This later coordinate pair represents the projected Zone 13 coordinates.

Uploading spatial data to NMCRIS

The NMCRIS map service gives users the ability to upload activity and resource polygons. Please note that this data must be in the NAD-83 UTM Zone 13 projection! This requirement holds even for projects located in the "Zone 12" part of the state.

  1. If a user attempts to upload a shapefile in any projection other than NAD-83 UTM Zone 13 the upload will fail (the system validates the .prj file behind the scenes).
  2. When using the "Enter XY values" tool to manually enter vertex coordinates, be certain that the coordinate values reflect the NAD-83 UTM Zone 13 projection. If field collected data are in another coordinate system it will be necessary to reproject the coordinate values. Note: this does not require the purchase of expensive GIS software. A number of free utilities for converting coordinate data from one projection to another are available over the internet. One such utility from the US ARMY Corps of Engineers is CorpsCon (crunch.tec.army.mil/software/corpscon/corpscon.html).
  3. The old-school method of heads-up digitizing by picking points against the underlying topo map or aerial photo (“eye-balling”) is not affected by the datum shift. This method may be employed exactly as it was done in the past.