Sourcing Standards

This registry documents threats to American public lands using verifiable, primary-source evidence only. It does not editorialize, speculate about motive, or use characterizing language. Every claim on every page can be traced to a specific, linked source.

Source hierarchy

1. Primary government/legal sources — Federal Register notices, environmental impact statements, court filings and rulings, legislative text, agency statements, GAO/CBO reports, procurement records.
2. Primary organizational sources — tribal government statements, named officials' direct, attributed statements.
3. Secondary reporting — established news organizations with named reporters and editorial standards. Local outlets covering their own region are treated as high-value.
4. Advocacy organization materials — used for framing and pointers to underlying data; factual claims are traced back to the primary document where possible.

Never used as sources: anonymous social posts, unlabeled aggregator content, opinion columns cited as fact, or any source a reader cannot independently verify.

No opinion, no characterization

Every sentence on this site must pass one test: could it be attributed to a specific named source, or is it this site's own conclusion? If it's the site's own conclusion, it either gets a citation or it doesn't get published. Quoted characterizations from sources are reported as quotes, not adopted as this site's language.

Corrections

Errors are never silently edited. Every page carries a dated corrections log at the bottom. When a fact is found to be wrong, it is struck through with the correction and date noted — not deleted.

Review process

No single contributor publishes their own unreviewed additions. All submitted facts are checked against their cited source by a separate reviewer before publication. See Contribute for the submission process.