Data Coverage by State

Every number below is an actual record count from the Camprtron dataset — the campgrounds, campsites, and dispersed sites we serve right now, not an estimate. Federal campgrounds come from the Recreation Information Database (RIDB / recreation.gov), which covers NPS, USFS, BLM, Corps of Engineers, Bureau of Reclamation, and U.S. Fish & Wildlife land nationwide. State-park campsites come from each state agency's own open GIS layer; the "N state parks" figure beside the campsite count is the agency's published park-system size, shown for context. City and county sites come from OpenStreetMap community mapping — there is no authoritative national inventory of city/county campgrounds, so we count what is mapped rather than invent a percentage we cannot defend. Dispersed sites are derived from Motor Vehicle Use Map (MVUM) roads on public land. Idaho state parks are not yet covered because the Idaho Department of Parks and Recreation (IDPR) ArcGIS layer blocks automated clients; federal campgrounds via RIDB still load there. Counts as of 2026-06-20, regenerated by scripts/build-coverage-matrix.ts on each data run.

Federal campgrounds — RIDB

The Recreation Information Database (RIDB) is maintained by recreation.gov and the U.S. Department of the Interior. It covers reservable campgrounds on land managed by NPS, USFS, BLM, the Corps of Engineers, Bureau of Reclamation, and U.S. Fish & Wildlife. RIDB is a national dataset, so every supported state has federal coverage — the count reflects how many federal campgrounds we have loaded for that state.

State parks — per-agency open GIS

Each state agency publishes its campground or facility inventory as an open ArcGIS FeatureServer or similar layer. We load each state’s layer through a descriptor-driven pipeline (src/config/state-park-sources.ts) that validates the source, stages records, checks completeness against a per-state floor, and swaps the table atomically. The count is the number of state-park campsite and facility records loaded; the “N state parks” figure beside it is the agency’s published park-system size.

Idaho is a gap: the IDPR open data layer blocks automated clients. Federal campgrounds via RIDB still load for Idaho. State parks will appear once a machine-readable source is available.

City / county — OpenStreetMap community layer

City and county public campgrounds are sourced from the OpenStreetMap (OSM) community-mapped layer via Overpass API. OSM provides a broad net that catches many public sites that agency open data misses, but it has no authoritative denominator — there is no federal or state inventory of all city and county campgrounds. We therefore report a count of what is mapped, and flag the coverage as community-mapped rather than imply it is exhaustive.

What is not covered

• Private campgrounds — KOA, Hipcamp, and similar private sites are out of scope. Camprtron covers public-land and public-agency camping only.
• Primitive / walk-in dispersed sites not on an MVUM road — the dispersed layer covers MVUM-designated routes; off-road or hike-in dispersed camping is not systematically catalogued.
• Tribal lands — campgrounds on tribal land are outside the current data scope.