Archive of Census Related Products (ACRP)

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Public Use Microdata Sample Areas (PUMA) Boundary Files, v1 (1990)

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Recommended Citation(s)*:

Center for International Earth Science Information Network - CIESIN. 1996. Archive of Census Related Products (ACRP): 1990 Public Use Microdata Sample Areas (PUMA) Boundary Files. Palisades, New York: NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC). https://doi.org/10.7927/H4QN64NG. Accessed DAY MONTH YEAR.

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The PUMA boundary files consist of a 5% sample (apuma) and 1% sample (bpuma) areas for the mapping of 1990 PUMS data covering the continental U.S., Alaska, and Hawaii. These boundary files are created based on equivalency files generated by the Geographic Correspondence Engine (Geocorr). A national census tract to PUMA geography correspondence file is used in merging the two files resulting in the PUMA geographies. An additional file is also available consisting of geographic centroids for the PUMA coverages calculated by UIC (Urban Information Center/ Office of Computing, University of Missouri).

The purpose of this project was to address the issue of the absence of an authoritative boundary layer for the geographies associated with the Public Use Micro Sample (PUMS) data files. The results are available in standard formats for easy use within desktop geographic information systems. 

Spatial Coverage

United States

Format

The data files are presented in 3 widely used formats: Atlas GIS "agf" system format, ArcView "shp" shapefile format, and the "bna" ascii-export format used by a number of geographic import/export utility packages. Each format has its own subdirectory in the archive.

United States files

  • thinned - county and state files for the contiguous United States. These files are a simple concatenation of the county files for the continental U.S. Thinning the files has been done in three steps, reducing the polygon points by 50% in each step. The "thinning levels" are indicated by the "thx" filename, where x is assigned a value of 1, 2, or 3. The value is indicative of the level of reduction for each step of thinning. The designation "00" within the filename indicates the continental U.S.
    • directory path: /pub/census/usa/tiger/us/thinned
  • unthinned - original Tiger line files.
    • directory path: /pub/census/usa/tiger/us/original