About NaturalPass

Who runs it

NaturalPass is an independent project with one maintainer. No state, agency, park system or tourism office runs it or reviews it before it ships.

What it's for

We want people to understand what outdoor recreation does in a state's economy, using numbers they can trace back to the publisher. The numbers answer different questions, so we keep them apart:

• How big is visitor spending?
• How much does the state's economy depend on it?
• What does it bring in for residents and the state budget?
• What do the public park systems take in and spend?
• How is wildlife conservation paid for?

We don't add these into a score, and we don't rank states.

What it covers

The site covers a small set of pilot states. We'll add more once the definitions hold up across the pilots. The coverage page lists every value our sources don't publish yet, and why.

How a number gets here

1. We find the publisher's own document or table.
2. We save the exact file and record its sha256 and the date we read it.
3. A parser written for that source reads the value. It keeps the definition, period and unit.
4. Validation checks every row. An error stops the publish. Warnings ship in the validation report.
5. Each publish is a numbered release. A release never changes after it ships.

The methodology explains the grades and the sources. The data page has every file, the column definitions and the changelog.

Review

Nobody outside the project has reviewed the data yet. Every value opens to its source, so you can check any number yourself. Where we compute a value, the panel lists each input.

Corrections

Every value's panel has a Report a problem with this value link. It opens a public report on GitHub with the state, metric ID, period, source and data version filled in. You'll need a GitHub account. You can also open a blank report.

When a value is wrong, we fix it in a new release and list the fix in the changelog. Old releases keep their numbers, so a citation never moves.