Front Country Areas are areas of the Monument where management will focus on maintaining multiple types of access for recreation and interpretive opportunities. Emphasis is on access to cultural and biological areas for extensive public use while maintaining the integrity of resources. Back Country Areas are areas of the Monument where management will focus on maintaining the natural landscape and primitive recreation opportunities. The emphasis of Back Country is to preserve natural primitive landscapes while allowing needed access to cultural and biological areas. This shapefile contains RMP Alternative B for Front and Back Country designation on the Agua Fria National Monument. Overall, the RMP Alternatives comprise Alternative A, also known as the no-action or current management alternative, and four action alternatives: Alternative B, which plans for increased public use while ensuring resource protection; Alternative C, which provides visitors with opportunities to experience the natural landscapes and cultural resource setting of the Monument, generally with more restrictive decisions than Alternative B; Alternative D, which emphasizes the preservation of undeveloped, primitive landscapes on the Monument, resulting in limited public use and the withdrawal of authorized grazing; and Alternative E, the preferred alternative.
In a particular alternative, the key "alternative (e.g. Alt A) attribute" has a domain that represents the several possible designations for each polygon. A particular polygon is assigned the designation that planners deemed appropriate. For this resource, if a particular area is a place where this resource will not be one of the "multiple uses" of the land, the designation is "not allocated." The entire "allocation" of the resource in each alternative is the sum of the acres, throughout the extent, for which the land has a management designation (other than "not allocated").
This data set was prepared for use in the BLM Phoenix Field Office (PFO) Agua Fria National Monument and Bradshaw-Harquahala planning areas Resource Management Planning (RMP) process. The RMP process was initiated by the publication of the Notice of Intent (NOI) in the Federal Register on April 24, 2002 (67 FR 20148), and was ongoing when the consultant (Jones & Stokes) datasets were submitted to BLM PFO in March, 2004. The shapefile is intended for regional analysis and display at a scale of 1:24,000. Abstract and corresponding spatial domain (extent) indicate the area covered by the shapefile, within or outside the planning areas.