Query mineral deposit records (MRDS) within a geographic bounding box
domain: USGS MRData API (Mineral Resources Data System) · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Review the API catalog at mrdata.usgs.gov/catalog/api.php to identify the MRDS web service endpoint and supported query parameters.
Construct a bounding-box query (min/max latitude-longitude) to retrieve deposit records located within that rectangle.
Request the response in a supported format and parse fields such as deposit name, commodity, and site type.
For deeper attributes (geologic description, production/reserves), follow linked record IDs into the full MRDS record rather than expecting them in the bounding-box summary response.
Combine with the MRData commodity map layers (mrdata.usgs.gov/mrds/map-commodity.html) to visually validate query results before bulk ingestion.
Known gotchas
MRDS is a compiled historical dataset of variable data quality/vintage per record — some entries lack full descriptive fields, so treat completeness as record-by-record, not guaranteed.
MRData exposes multiple distinct datasets (MRDS, USMIN, others) under separate endpoints; a bounding-box call against the wrong dataset silently returns zero or unrelated results.
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