Where the numbers come from

Every fact on this site traces to a free, public, authoritative source. Nothing is scraped from behind a paywall, and nothing about the regulations is filled in from memory.

Conditions & terrain

National Weather Service

The forecast behind every score: air temperature, wind speed and direction, sky cover, precipitation, forecast snowfall, and active alerts, pulled per coordinate from the NWS gridpoint. It is the single largest input to the day’s conditions.

api.weather.gov →

NWS observation stations

Barometric pressure and its 3-hour tendency, read from the nearest reporting station where the gridpoint forecast carries no pressure. This drives the pressure factor, which matters to deer more before a front than after one.

USGS Elevation Point Query Service

Surface elevation at any coordinate, used for pin context and to help rank one tract against another.

USGS EPQS →

MRLC / National Land Cover Database

The dominant land cover at a point (hardwood forest, cropland, wetland, brush), sampled across each tract to read its habitat, including the food-to-cover edge deer favor. Feeds the habitat portion of the land ranking.

MRLC NLCD →

Geography

US Census Bureau

County land area and internal-point coordinates, parsed deterministically from the Census Gazetteer and TIGERweb. Land area turns a county’s deer harvest into a per-square-mile herd-density proxy; the centroids anchor the county and near-a-city pages.

Census Gazetteer →

FCC Area API

Resolves any coordinate to the county it falls in, so a dropped pin picks up the right regulations, harvest, and CWD status. It is also the check that confirms every public-land pin sits in the county we filed it under.

FCC Area API →

OpenStreetMap / Nominatim

When you type a place name into the scout tool, a single request to the public OSM geocoder turns it into a coordinate. A coordinate or your device location never leaves your browser; only a name you type is looked up.

Nominatim →

USDA Forest Service & state GIS

National-forest boundaries and acreage come from the USFS. Where a state publishes harvest by wildlife-management unit rather than county (Pennsylvania), each county’s unit is resolved against the authoritative PASDA GIS layer rather than guessed.

Regulations & harvest — the part that has to be right

State wildlife agencies

Season dates, bag limits, legal shooting hours, and Chronic Wasting Disease zones come from each state’s wildlife agency, and often from the state Administrative Code, which is usually the most current text. County deer-harvest totals come from the agency’s annual report. Every value carries the exact URL we read and the date we verified it. A drift checker (npm run check:regs) snapshots each source page and flags any change on the next run, so a quietly edited season date can’t slip through unnoticed. A wrong date here is a poaching risk, not a rounding error, so where a rule isn’t verified we say so rather than assert an open or closed season.

Ohio: ODNR and the Ohio Administrative Code. Indiana: DNR. Kentucky: KDFWR. Maryland: MD DNR. West Virginia: WVDNR. Pennsylvania: the Game Commission.

Computed, not fetched

Sunrise, sunset, legal shooting light, moon phase and illumination, and the solunar feeding periods are calculated locally from the coordinate and date using published astronomical formulas. The rut calendar is derived from photoperiod for the tract’s latitude. None of these needs an API; the math runs at build time.

What we don’t do

• We don’t aggregate user-submitted harvest reports or trail-camera photos.
• We don’t invent conditions where there’s no real source. A coordinate with no nearby forecast point shows the nearest covered point, not a fabricated reading for your exact tree.
• We don’t license proprietary hunting-data feeds.
• We don’t reorder anything editorial for advertising money. See the methodology.

Sibling site

itsafishingday.com data sources — the fishing site’s equivalent page, built on many of the same public APIs.