About Public Lands DB
I'm Nicolas Sartor, and I built Public Lands DB because I kept getting burned trying to figure out, on the fly, whether a spot was BLM, Forest Service, a state park, or wilderness, and whether I could camp there or had walked into a burn ban. So I built the thing I wanted to exist: one place that says who manages a piece of land and what you can actually do there.
The problem
79.8% of Nevada is federal land. Most of it is open to the public, and very little of it comes with a clear answer to "what am I allowed to do here?" Getting that answer yourself is a chore:
- It's split across agencies that don't talk to each other. The Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service, the state parks division, and the wilderness program each run their own website, with their own maps, their own rule formats, and their own names for the same place.
- The rules hide in documents, not pages. Stay limits are in forest orders, camping rules in field-office PDFs, wilderness regulations on a separate site, and fire restrictions in news posts that change with the weather.
- Ordinary maps don't show who manages the land. The dataset that does, PAD-US, is a GIS download most people will never open.
- Third-party pages copy old information and disagree with each other, so you end up trusting whichever one you found first.
- And you usually need the answer at the trailhead, with one bar of signal and no time to read five agency websites.
Public Lands DB does that digging once, for every unit: it reads each agency source, resolves conflicts toward the agency that manages the land, cites its sources with the date each was checked, and re-checks closures and fire restrictions every six hours. You get one page per unit that answers the question.
Closures and fire restrictions, checked every six hours
The facts most likely to ruin a trip are the ones that change: a road or campground closed for repairs, a burn ban that starts on a Friday, an area shut after a fire. Agencies post these as news items and alerts on their own sites, and nobody has time to check them all before heading out.
Public Lands DB checks the agencies' closure and alert feeds, and the signed fire restriction orders on each state's interagency fire site, four times a day. Closures show at the top of each unit's page and fire restrictions in their own section, each with a link to the agency's own notice or order and the date it was last checked. If something is closed or a fire restriction is in effect, you see it before you drive out, not after.
What you get here
- Every public land unit I've been able to map so far: 886 across Nevada, Utah, Arizona, California, with more states coming.
- A clickable US map on the homepage that opens each covered state's public land map, plus interactive unit and ownership maps on every state and unit page.
- Per unit: who manages it, fees and hours, camping and dispersed-camping rules, permits, and the office to call, as the agency publishes them, plus photos where a freely licensed one exists.
- Current closures and fire restrictions, re-checked against the agencies every six hours.
- What's around it: the campgrounds, lakes, and neighboring land units inside or next to the boundary, linked to their own pages.
Where the data comes from
Boundaries and identity come from PAD-US, the national public-land dataset from the U.S. Geological Survey. Rules, fees, and contacts come from the managing agencies themselves: state parks divisions, the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and wilderness.net. Every page cites its sources and the date each was checked. When no source says something, the page says nothing rather than guessing.
Who's behind this
It's just me working on this on the side, no team and no editorial board: one person reading agency records and writing down what they say. Public Lands DB is one of a group of sites I write and maintain under the Wild Atlas Media network, all built on the same idea: take the federal and state data that's already public, put it in one place, and make it easy to use.
Sister sites: CampgroundsDB for public campgrounds and how to book them, Fishypedia for fish stocking reports and lake-by-lake fishing, and ReservoirFinder for reservoir water levels against full pool. Boat ramps and swimming holes are next.
Tell me what's missing or wrong
If a spot near you isn't accurate, a unit is missing, or there's a feature you wish this had, I want to hear it. Email nicolas.sartor@wildatlasmedia.com.