Public Lands Intelligence aggregates data from 18 federal and research sources to provide conservation professionals with cross-referenced intelligence. This page documents each data source, what we collect, how often we update, and the known limitations of each dataset.
Important Note on Data Accuracy
All data on this platform originates from public federal sources and is subject to the accuracy, completeness, and timeliness of those sources. MTJP editorial analysis, AI-generated summaries, and cross-tool intelligence connections are clearly labeled and represent our analytical interpretation, not official government positions. Users should verify all data against primary sources before use in legal, regulatory, or policy proceedings.
Last updated: May 23, 2026
That stamp is a review date for the prose on this page. It is not a measurement date. The counts inside each source card below were taken when that card was written, this page does not record when each one was taken, and several have not been re-measured since. Read them as snapshots, never as live figures. Refresh cadence and last-run time for every pipeline are published live, off the job log, on Data Health inside the platform. Where a count here disagrees with a tool in the platform, the tool is the one reading the database.
Official source for campaign finance data in U.S. federal elections.
Weekly (Sunday 1:00 AM ET)
PAC-to-candidate contributions, individual contributions to PACs, committee filings, and disbursement records. Currently tracking 1.37 million itemized FEC transactions across four election cycles. The money figures we publish count true contributions to the candidate only (FEC transaction types 24K, 24Z, 24C and 24F), attributed by FEC candidate id, and are net of refunds and redesignations: $321.6M in 2020, $363.9M in 2022, $450.3M in 2024 and $313.1M so far in 2026. Independent expenditures (24E for, 24A against) are tracked separately and never counted as money a candidate received.
FEC data has a reporting lag of 30-90 days depending on filing schedules. Amended filings may not be reflected immediately. Dark money (501c4) organizations are not required to disclose donors to the FEC. The 2026 cycle is still open, so its total is partial by definition.
Official source for congressional legislation, votes, and member information maintained by the Library of Congress.
Daily (bills at 8:00 AM, votes at 4:00 AM, member sync at 6:00 AM ET)
Bill text, status, cosponsors, committee assignments, roll call votes, and member biographical data. We filter for bills related to public lands, conservation, energy, environment, and natural resources.
Vote data may be delayed by several hours after roll calls conclude. Bill text updates can lag behind floor amendments. Committee hearing schedules are not consistently available via API.
Open database of U.S. court opinions and PACER docket data maintained by the Free Law Project.
Daily (3:00 AM ET)
Federal court opinions, docket entries, and party information for environmental and public lands litigation. Cases are filtered by subject matter codes and keyword matching for conservation relevance.
PACER data has inherent delays as courts upload documents at varying speeds. State court proceedings are less comprehensively covered. Some sealed or restricted documents are not available.
Official daily publication of the U.S. Government containing rules, proposed rules, notices, and executive orders.
Daily (10:00 AM ET)
Rules, proposed rules, notices, and presidential documents from agencies including DOI, EPA, USDA, BLM, USFS, FWS, NOAA, and NPS. Each entry is classified by conservation relevance and significance.
The Federal Register publishes on business days only. Unpublished rules in the regulatory pipeline are not included. Agency guidance documents that do not appear in the Federal Register are not captured.
National Interagency Fire Center maintains the authoritative database of active wildland fires across the United States.
Daily (6:00 AM ET)
Active fire incidents including location, size (acres), containment percentage, discovery date, cause, managing agency, and proximity to protected areas. Cross-referenced with public lands boundaries from PADUS.
Fire data is updated by incident management teams and may not reflect real-time conditions. Small fires under 10 acres may not be reported. Historical fire data before 2014 has less standardized formatting. IRWIN occasionally returns stale incidents that have been resolved.
Bureau of Land Management case recordation system tracking mining claims, oil and gas leases, rights-of-way, and other use authorizations on federal lands.
Weekly (Sunday 2:00 AM ET)
Mining claims (lode and placer), oil and gas leases, rights-of-way permits, coal leases, geothermal leases, and grazing permits. Currently tracking 292,000+ extraction records across all categories: 71K hardrock mining, 102K infrastructure/ROW, 32K oil and gas, 17K grazing, 35K timber, 2K geothermal, and 400 coal.
LR2000 is a legacy system with inconsistent data formatting across state offices. Some records lack geographic coordinates and must be geocoded from legal land descriptions. Historical records before 2000 may be incomplete. The system experiences periodic downtime.
USDA Forest Service data on timber sales, special use permits, and forest management activities across 193 million acres of national forests and grasslands.
Weekly (Sunday 2:20 AM ET)
Timber sale records, special use permits, and forest plan amendments. Records are cross-referenced with wilderness and roadless area boundaries.
Timber sale data is not available through a single centralized API. Regional variations in data formatting require custom parsing. Some historical timber sale records are only available in PDF format.
Manages energy and mineral resources on the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf including oil, gas, and renewable energy leases.
Weekly (Wednesday 3:00 AM ET)
Offshore oil and gas lease data from the LSTLEASE.DAT fixed-width download file. Currently tracking 31,662 offshore leases (2,171 active, 15,692 terminated, 12,283 expired) with block, area, and company information.
BOEM data files use fixed-width legacy formats that require careful column mapping. Lease status changes may not be reflected for several weeks after official action. Renewable energy lease data (offshore wind) uses a different data structure than oil and gas leases.
Collects and distributes revenue from energy and mineral production on federal and tribal lands and the Outer Continental Shelf.
Bi-monthly (1st and 15th)
Revenue data by commodity (oil, gas, coal, renewables), state, and fiscal year. Currently tracking $9.9B in federal revenue across 22 states including royalties, rents, bonuses, and other revenues.
Revenue data is reported with a 2-3 month lag. Tribal revenue data has additional restrictions on geographic specificity. Some revenue categories are aggregated to prevent identification of individual operators.
Produces economic statistics including the Outdoor Recreation Satellite Account (ORSA) measuring the outdoor recreation economy.
Quarterly update check
Outdoor recreation GDP by state, value added by activity type, and employment figures. Currently tracking $639.5B in outdoor recreation GDP across all 50 states and D.C.
ORSA data is released annually with approximately a 2-year lag. State-level breakdowns may not capture all outdoor recreation activities. Methodology changes between years can affect comparability.
Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) providing employment and wage data by industry and geography.
Quarterly update check
Employment and wage data for recreation-related NAICS codes (7121 Museums/Historical Sites, 7139 Amusement/Recreation). Used to compare extractive industry employment against outdoor recreation employment by state.
QCEW data has a 6-9 month reporting lag. Suppressed data cells (to protect employer confidentiality) can create gaps in rural counties. NAICS codes do not perfectly capture all outdoor recreation employment.
Economic impact analysis of visitor spending in and around national parks, produced in partnership with the U.S. Geological Survey.
Annual update check
Visitor spending by park and state, economic output, jobs supported, labor income, and value added from NPS visitor activity. Currently tracking $26.1B in total visitor spending.
VSE data is based on visitor surveys and economic modeling, not direct measurement. Published annually with approximately a 1-year lag. Spending estimates for individual parks may have larger error margins for parks with fewer survey respondents.
U.S. DOE national laboratory producing research on energy technologies, data center energy consumption, and environmental impacts.
Daily check for new publications
Data center energy consumption estimates, efficiency metrics, and growth projections used in the Data Center Threat Tracker tool.
LBNL publications are research estimates, not direct measurements. Data center energy figures rely on modeling and industry surveys with significant uncertainty ranges. Coverage of specific facility-level data is limited.
EPA partnership providing real-time air quality data including AQI readings from monitoring stations across the United States.
Daily (8:00 AM ET)
Air Quality Index (AQI) readings, PM2.5 and ozone levels near active fire incidents and extraction sites. Used to assess air quality impacts on nearby communities and protected areas.
Monitoring station coverage is sparse in rural and wilderness areas where many fires and extraction activities occur. AQI readings represent conditions at the monitoring station, not necessarily at the incident location. Smoke dispersion modeling is not included.
Interagency incident information system providing narrative updates, closures, and evacuation information for wildland fire incidents.
Twice daily (10:00 AM and 10:00 PM ET)
Incident narratives, area closures, evacuation notices, and supplementary details not available in IRWIN structured data. Used to enrich fire records with human-readable context.
InciWeb updates depend on incident management teams and may be delayed during active firefighting operations. Not all incidents tracked in IRWIN have corresponding InciWeb pages. Historical data retention is limited. InciWeb publishes no incident identifier we can join on, so its incidents are matched to IRWIN fires on location, confirmed by name or acreage; where the two records disagree on location the narrative is not carried rather than attached to a fire we are not sure it belongs to. InciWeb also publishes umbrella pages covering several fires at once (complexes, area-wide outbreaks) that correspond to no single IRWIN incident, and those are not carried either. The InciWeb RSS feed began refusing automated requests in June 2026 and this ingest reads the public incident pages instead.
NASA satellite-based fire detection using MODIS and VIIRS instruments, providing near-real-time active fire data globally.
Daily (7:00 AM ET)
Satellite-detected thermal anomalies (hotspots) with coordinates, confidence levels, fire radiative power, and satellite overpass times. Used to validate and supplement IRWIN ground-reported fire data.
Satellite detection has a minimum fire size threshold (approximately 1000 sq meters for VIIRS). Cloud cover can prevent detection. False positives can occur from industrial heat sources, volcanic activity, or sun glint. Temporal resolution depends on satellite overpass schedule (typically 2-4 times per day per location).
The official inventory of protected areas in the United States, maintained by the U.S. Geological Survey Gap Analysis Project (GAP). Contains fee-simple ownership boundaries for all federal, state, and local conservation lands.
On-demand (loaded when PADUS Boundaries layer is enabled on the map)
Federal land boundaries for NPS, USFS, BLM, FWS, and Bureau of Reclamation lands. Polygon geometries rendered on the Public Lands Map via ArcGIS FeatureServer queries, with agency-specific coloring and detail tooltips.
PADUS is updated approximately once per year. Boundary changes from land acquisitions, transfers, or disposition may not be reflected until the next release. Polygon simplification at lower zoom levels can obscure small parcels. The ArcGIS FeatureServer has query limits per request, requiring viewport-based fetching.
Official repository of LD-2 lobbying disclosure filings required by the Lobbying Disclosure Act. Filed quarterly by registered lobbyists, disclosing client names, issues lobbied, government entities contacted, and expenditures.
Quarterly (manual enrichment)
LD-2 filings for energy, environment, and natural resources issue codes. Currently tracking 1,844 filings from 69 targeted entities with $519M in reported lobbying expenditures. Includes 121 links between lobbying filings and specific bills in our database, and named lobbyists with government entity contacts.
LD-2 filings are self-reported by lobbyists and subject to the accuracy of their disclosures. Filing deadlines are quarterly, creating up to a 3-month lag. Expenditure ranges are reported in broad bands, not exact figures. Grassroots lobbying and below-threshold activity is not captured. 501(c)(4) organizations have different disclosure requirements.
Beyond individual data sources, Public Lands Intelligence connects data across tools to surface relationships that would otherwise require manual research across dozens of federal databases. For example:
These connections are generated through a combination of geographic proximity matching, entity resolution, temporal correlation, and editorial classification. Cross-tool connections are labeled as "MTJP Analysis" to distinguish them from primary federal data.
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