Methodology
PerfectLake v0.1 is a hand-curated set of 75 lakes. Each place is described from public, attributable data sources, layered with hand-written narratives. Every attribute we show carries its source — an attribute without provenance is a bug, not a feature.
This first version is deliberately small and curated rather than comprehensive: we would rather be honest about 75 lakes than approximate about thousands.
Data sources
- Bird observation data from eBird (Cornell Lab of Ornithology)
- © OpenStreetMap contributors
- NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information
- Hydrography from the USGS 3D Hydrography Program (3DHP)
- Water-clarity data from the U.S. EPA National Lakes Assessment 2017
- Water-clarity tier derived from Sentinel-2 L2A imagery (blue/red + NDCI over water pixels, 2021–2024 growing season) via the Microsoft Planetary Computer; Copernicus Sentinel data
- Median home value from the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey (table B25077)
- Place metadata from Wikidata