A surprising amount of public land data is hiding in plain sight. Open a county’s GIS portal, a state parcel viewer, or a municipal zoning map, and the page is quietly loading authoritative geospatial layers — tax parcels, zoning, flood zones, ownership — straight from an ArcGIS or WMS server. The map shows you the picture. It almost never shows you the source. Today we’re releasing a free Chrome extension that does: the Landrecords.us Layer Assistant.

What it does

The Layer Assistant lists every ArcGIS/Esri feature layer and WMS layer loaded by the page you’re looking at, with a direct link to each layer’s source. Click the toolbar icon on any mapping site and you get the inventory the page was using all along — the service endpoints behind the map, ready to open, inspect, or pull data from.

The screenshot above shows it running on a Maine town’s public parcel viewer: ten layers detected, the parcel feature layer surfaced with its projection (EPSG:3857) and a one-click copy of its ArcGIS FeatureServer URL, the county auto-identified as Androscoggin County (FIPS 23001), and the request Referer the site’s services expect — everything you’d otherwise reconstruct by hand from the network tab.

• Finds the layers automatically. As the page loads its map, the extension catalogs the feature services and WMS endpoints it requests — no digging through network tabs or view-source.
• Links straight to the source. Each detected layer comes with a direct link to its service, plus one-click Copy and Meta, so you can open the REST endpoint, read its fields and metadata, or query it directly. The projection (EPSG) is called out for each layer.
• Gives you the context, too. It identifies the county and FIPS code for the area in view, and surfaces the Referer the page’s services are called with — the detail that often makes the difference between a service that responds and one that doesn’t.
• Works wherever the maps are. County GIS portals, state parcel viewers, municipal zoning and permitting maps — if a page is drawing data from an Esri feature service or a WMS, the Layer Assistant surfaces it, and a search box filters the list when a page loads dozens of layers.

Why we built it

Assembling a nationwide parcel dataset means tracking down the authoritative source in thousands of jurisdictions, one county at a time. The single most useful question we ask, over and over, is simply: where is this map actually getting its data? Answering it by hand — opening developer tools, filtering network requests, decoding service URLs — is slow and easy to get wrong. We built the Layer Assistant to answer it in one click, and it’s become part of our daily workflow. It’s just as handy for anyone who works with public geospatial data: GIS analysts, researchers, developers, and anyone who would rather work from the source layer than a screenshot of it.

Privacy

The Layer Assistant reads the layers on the page you’re viewing and shows them to you. That’s all. It doesn’t collect or sell your data, and it isn’t used for any unrelated purpose. The whole extension is a lightweight 63 KB — it stays out of your way until you click it.

Get it

The Landrecords.us Layer Assistant is free on the Chrome Web Store: install it here. Add it to Chrome, open any mapping site, and click the icon to see the layers underneath.

Curious about parcel coverage in your area, or want to put our data to work? Browse the US Nationwide Parcel Dataset, or reach us anytime at hello@landrecords.us — we always want to hear what you’re building.