Methodology

PerfectLake v0.1 uses a 59-lake launch roster selected from a frozen 75-lake source superset. A lake appears only after public, attributable data is layered with a hand-written narrative and reviewed; selection alone does not publish it. Every attribute we show carries its source — an attribute without provenance is a bug, not a feature.

The launch target is 59 fully reviewed lakes. While curation is underway, we would rather publish fewer fully reviewed lakes than approximate about thousands.

Every fact in the panels of a lake page carries three things: the source that produced it, how wide an area it describes, and the date it was current. A county-level figure and a reading taken on the lake itself are different kinds of evidence, so we say which one you are looking at. The lake’s name and centroid are part of its identity record rather than cited facts.

That line is a label, not a footnote — it names the source and the scope, and does not link to the individual record behind that one number. Two of the sources below are ours: curator means a person on our team made the call, and curated web harvest means a person read named public pages and wrote down what they said, quoting those pages and the date inside the value itself. Where a fact is a judgment rather than a measurement, we would rather say so than dress it up.

Three of the qualities on a lake page are bands, not measurements. Water clarity runs from glass-clear to turbid; night sky runs from darkest to bright; surroundings run from rural to near-metro. Each band is assigned per lake and carries the source that assigned it.

Most clarity bands come from satellite imagery classification rather than a depth reading taken in the water, and most night-sky bands come from satellite radiance rather than a brightness reading taken at the shoreline. So a lake page names the band and who assigned it, and does not print a measurement we did not take.

When a search result gives a reason — high elevation, cold winters, a small lake — the band word is ours: a PerfectLake threshold applied to a stored measurement, and it is labeled as our method. The number beside the word keeps its own source, scope, and date, exactly as on a lake page. We never print a word without the measurement it came from, and we never print a measurement we did not take.

The label a search result prints beside that word resolves here:

• A PerfectLake band word (glass-clear, cold winters, high, small…) assigned to a stored measurement by our published thresholds — the word cites this method; the number beside it cites its own source