Data sources & licensing
Where every layer comes from, and the licensing rules that decide what gets published.
Every source in the registry carries a license and a redistributable
flag, recorded when it's added and enforced when tiles are published. The
rules:
- Public domain federal data — ingest, publish, done.
- State and county sources — record the exact terms. If redistribution is prohibited, the source is excluded from published tiles (it can still serve local development).
- OpenStreetMap — ODbL attribution and share-alike honored in published basemap tiles.
- Owner names are public records, but display policy (including opt-out handling) is treated as a serious open decision, not a default.
We build from primary and open sources only. No commercial hunting app's data, imagery, or content is used — ever.
The source families
Land ownership
| Source | What | License |
|---|---|---|
| USGS PAD-US 4.1 | All public/protected areas, every manager | Public domain |
| BLM SMA | Authoritative federal surface ownership, western states | Public domain |
| State cadastral programs | Statewide parcels — CO's OIT composite, ~20 states have similar | Open, varies |
| County assessors | Parcels where no statewide fabric exists (the community surface) | Recorded per county |
Hunt units and access
Every state wildlife agency publishes unit boundaries as shapefiles or ArcGIS services: CPW (Colorado GMUs), WGFD (Wyoming hunt areas), CDFW (California zones, CC-BY 4.0), and the rest as states get added. Walk-in programs (CPW Walk-In Access, Montana Block Management, Kansas WIHA, …) publish annually where they publish at all.
Terrain
USGS 3DEP elevation, public domain — DEMs, and the derived slope, aspect, hillshade, and 3D terrain.
Habitat and access infrastructure
USFS MVUM (legal motorized routes), COTREX and OSM trails, USFS FACTS (timber cuts), MTBS and NIFC (burns and fire perimeters) — the disturbance layers arrive as states get their base set.
Water
USGS NHD point waters (public domain): springs/seeps, wells, and waterfalls with GNIS names where recorded. Guzzler/catchment locations are not published openly by state agencies and are deliberately absent rather than approximated.
Basemap
OpenStreetMap-derived vector tiles (Protomaps builds), with OpenHunt's own glyph ranges served beside the tiles — no third-party CDN in the critical path, and the same files the mobile offline packs use.
Normalized schemas
Per-state schemas differ wildly, so every source maps into a common schema
per layer class — parcel, hunt_unit, public_land, access_program —
via the SQL in its source YAML. The map
renders the common schema; that's why new states need no rendering code.
Published artifacts
Everything published (tiles, processed layers) is freely downloadable, and carries the license of its sources. Open data in, open data out.