Start with public-interest, agency, and reservoir metadata records by state.
Methodology
National lake coverage starts with source provenance.
LakeStat promotes a lake page from catalog record to observed status only when a public feed can be normalized without hiding source age, source ownership, or missing measurements.
Expansion Strategy
Programmatic lake pages, light editorial context, and explicit freshness.
Attach measurements only when the source field, unit, timestamp, and cadence are clear.
Expose source age and unavailable states instead of inventing a complete status.
Public Contract
Every crawlable page should answer where the data came from.
State pages
Summarize lake count, observed coverage, source mix, and regional entry points.
Lake pages
Show current measurements, timestamps, managing agency, source ledger, and related lakes.
Source pages
Document coverage, cadence, latest run status, notes, and the lake pages each source affects.