Hunt Research IQ Pro — User Manual

Your guide to turning 20 years of western big-game harvest data into real hunt-planning intelligence.

1. Welcome to Hunt Research IQ Pro

If you're reading this, you're probably already sold on the idea that picking the right unit matters more than picking the right rifle. Western elk and mule deer hunting rewards the scout who shows up armed with data — and this tool exists to make sure that's you.

What this tool actually does

Hunt Research IQ Pro takes nearly two decades of official harvest data from Montana, Idaho, and Colorado — more than 11,000 unit-year records across 753 hunting units — and turns it into something you can actually act on. Instead of reading through PDFs and squinting at tiny columns, you get:

• A unified rankings screen that scores every unit 0–400 for both bow and rifle, using decile-based logic applied to six different harvest metrics.
• Deep dives on any single unit showing 20 years of year-by-year performance, trend direction, and how it stacks up against the rest of its state.
• Side-by-side comparisons of up to five units with automatic winner highlighting and a head-to-head wins tally.
• Access intelligence for Montana units — public land percentage, hunter pressure per square mile of accessible ground, and harvest density — pulled from official MT FWP GIS boundaries.
• Customizable weights so you can tune the scoring system to what matters to you — big bulls, high success rates, solitude, or meat in the freezer.

Who this is for

This manual assumes you're an intermediate Western hunter. You know what a GMU is. You've filled out a tag application before. You've probably scouted units from state harvest PDFs and know how time-consuming that is. You don't need me to explain the difference between archery and rifle seasons — but you might appreciate a reminder of exactly why Montana Unit 700 is showing gold bars across the board even though it's a top unit (spoiler: because it's so consistent there's no variation to color-code).

A note on what this tool is not

This tool is a data analysis companion, not a replacement for boots-on-the-ground scouting, regulation research, or calling the local FWP biologist. It won't tell you:

• Whether you can draw a tag — we don't have draw odds data (yet).
• How to access a unit — we tell you how much public land exists, but not where the trailheads are.
• What the weather will do — unit elevation and snowfall patterns are not tracked.
• Local specifics — where elk bed in cold fronts, which drainages get hunted hardest, who owns the checker-boarded private parcels.

Use Hunt Research IQ Pro to narrow the field from hundreds of possible units down to the 3–5 that are worth your deeper scouting time. Then go do the real work.

A word about data collection

Not all harvest data is created equal. Montana uses a voluntary phone survey with roughly 63% response rate. Idaho uses a mandatory 10-day online reporting system. Colorado uses mandatory reporting with a 30-day deadline. These methodologies produce data that's directionally useful across states, but not perfectly comparable. The tool surfaces warnings when you try cross-state comparisons, and the Data Sources tab has the full methodology breakdown. More on this in Chapter 8.

2. Getting Started

Opening the file

Hunt Research IQ Pro is a single HTML file — no install, no login, no internet connection required after the first load. Just double-click the file and it opens in your default browser. Everything runs locally in your browser; your data and preferences are saved in browser storage.

Supported browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari. Any modern browser from the last 3–4 years works.

The tabs at the top

• 🏆 Rankings — The main screen. Every unit scored and ranked, fully filterable.
• 📊 Unit Reports — Deep-dive detail pages for each unit. 20 years of data, charts, access metrics.
• ⚖️ Compare Units — Up to 5 units side-by-side with winner highlighting.
• ⚙️ Scoring Config — Tune the weights that drive the scoring.
• 📖 Data Sources — Methodology for each state's harvest data.
• 📘 Manual — This document.

🎯 Help Me Tune My Setup — the Setup Wizard

The first time you open Hunt Research IQ Pro, a welcome window pops up with two paths:

• 🚀 Get straight to work — skip the guided setup and jump to the dashboard with default scoring (or whatever settings you had saved from a previous session). Best if you're returning or comfortable diving in.
• 🎯 Help me dial it in — launches an 8-step guided interview that walks you through the scoring engine and lets you customize it for your specific hunt.

You can also re-open the wizard anytime via the 🎯 Help Me Tune My Setup button in the top-right of the header.

How the wizard works

It's a short, guided conversation in 8 steps:

1. Welcome — pick guided setup or skip.
2. Quick profile — tell us the state, species (elk or mule deer), and primary weapon (bow or rifle) you're planning around. All three on one screen.
3. Total Bulls — how important are raw animal counts to you? Slider 0–10.
4. Total Harvest — how important is overall unit productivity?
5. Bull Success Rate — how important are your odds of killing a bull?
6. Harvest Success Rate — how important are your odds of killing any legal animal?
7. Bow Harvest Rate — how important is archery-friendliness of the unit?
8. 6-Point Bull Rate (or 4-Point Buck Rate for deer) — how important is trophy quality?

After those six metric questions, a final Summary screen shows your complete custom setup with a table of your chosen weights. Hit Apply & Start → and the app instantly configures the Rankings page to your exact specifications.

What happens when you apply

Each time you complete the wizard, the app does the following behind the scenes:

• Sets the filter bar — State, Species, and Hunt Type are all set to what you picked.
• Writes the weights to your chosen weapon only — if you picked bow, your rifle scoring weights are untouched (and vice versa). This means you can run the wizard twice — once for your bow setup, once for your rifle setup — without either wiping out the other.
• Recomputes all scores and refreshes the Rankings page.
• Navigates to Rankings so you can immediately see your personalized unit list.

Don't know what a metric means?

Each question includes a plain-English explanation of the metric — so even if you've never thought about "Bow Harvest Rate" before, you learn what it measures while building your profile. If a metric doesn't matter to you, rate it low. If it matters a lot, rate it high. The system default is shown below each slider as a hint — you can just click Next to accept every default and end up with the standard, well-balanced scoring.

The wizard vs. Scoring Config

Both let you customize weights — they're two paths to the same place. The wizard is structured and educational; the Scoring Config page is a free-form dashboard where you tweak individual weights directly with sliders. New users benefit from the wizard; power users often prefer Scoring Config for quick tweaks.

Dismissing the auto-popup

If you don't want the welcome window to appear on every first visit going forward, check the "Don't show this automatically again" box on the welcome screen before skipping. The 🎯 Help Me Tune My Setup header button will still reopen it whenever you want.

Your first 5 minutes

Here's a suggested first-pass if you're brand new:

1. Rankings page loads by default. You'll land on Colorado elk sorted by bow score, last-5-year average. Right there, in 10 seconds, you can see the top units in the state. (Any filter you change is remembered, so the next time you open the tool it picks up right where you left off.)
2. Click the → arrow button in the Report column of any unit. That opens the full Unit Report.
3. Go back to Rankings. Check the little boxes in the Compare column for 2–3 units that interest you.
4. Click "⚖️ Compare Selected →" in the floating bar at the bottom of the screen. Welcome to the Compare Units page.
5. Go to ⚙️ Scoring Config. Drag the weight sliders around. Watch how the Rankings page reshuffles when you come back. This is where the real customization lives.

That's the loop: Rank → Drill Down → Compare → Tune → Repeat.

What the app remembers

Everything you customize sticks around between sessions, saved locally in your browser:

• Rankings filters — state, species, hunt type, year window, health filter, public-land filter, min score, min years, search text, and sort column all persist.
• Compare selections — the units you checked and the ones you typed into the dropdowns come back the next time you open the app.
• Column visibility — which columns you've shown or hidden on Rankings.
• Scoring weights — any custom weighting you set up in the Scoring Config.

If you ever want to reset to the defaults, look for the "Reset to Defaults" button on the Scoring Config page. On Rankings, the smaller ↺ Reset button clears just the secondary filters (Year, Health, Public Land, Tag Access, Min Score/Years, Search) while preserving your current Species, State, and Hunt Type.

Shared context across Rankings and Reports

Three filters — Species, State, and Hunt Type — are treated as one shared context across the Rankings and Unit Reports tabs. Change any of them from either tab and the matching dropdown on the other tab updates too. This keeps both views consistent and predictable as you move between them. The small "Viewing" chip in the top nav row always shows your current context (e.g., 🦌 Elk · MT · Rifle) so you know exactly what you're looking at no matter which tab is open. The Compare tab's quick-add State dropdown stays independent — it's a per-add helper, not a primary filter.

📸 Screenshot needed: ss-rankings-main.png — capture the Rankings page on first load showing the full filter bar at the top.

3. The Scoring System — How Units Are Rated

This is the single most important chapter in the manual. If you understand how the scoring works, everything else in the app makes sense. If you don't, the numbers will look arbitrary. Take five minutes with this section.

The big idea: rate every metric on a 1–10 scale, then blend them

Every unit gets scored using up to seven metrics. Each metric produces a rating from 1 (worst) to 10 (best) based on how the unit compares to other units in its own state. Those ratings are then blended through weights you control into a single composite score per weapon type. A Rating 10 on every metric lands a unit at the top of the scale; a Rating 1 across the board lands at the bottom. The seventh metric (Bull:Cow / Buck:Doe Ratio) is currently available only for Colorado units, where CPW publishes DAU-level herd composition surveys; units in other states skip that metric without penalty (the remaining six metrics still score them normally).

The metrics

Here's what gets scored and what each metric tells you about a unit:

Decile-based ratings (why 1–10 works so well)

For each metric, the app takes every unit in the state and sorts them from lowest to highest on that metric. Then it slices that sorted list into 10 equal-sized buckets called deciles. Your unit's rating is whichever decile it lands in.

• Rating 1 — bottom 10% of the state
• Rating 5 — near the median
• Rating 10 — top 10% of the state

This matters because raw numbers don't tell you much without context. A unit with 120 bulls harvested sounds great — until you learn that's only the 30th percentile for Montana. A unit with 35 bulls harvested sounds mediocre — until you learn it's Idaho's 95th percentile for that metric. Deciles normalize that out.

Per-state thresholds (Why MT vs MT, not MT vs CO)

The decile cutoffs are calculated separately for each state. Montana's Rating 10 threshold for Total Bulls is computed from Montana units only. Idaho's is calculated from Idaho only. Colorado's from Colorado only.

This is by design. Scores are for within-state comparison, not cross-state. A Rating 10 in MT and a Rating 10 in ID both mean "top 10% of that state" — but the absolute numbers behind those ratings differ dramatically because of state size, regulations, and hunter effort.

State-by-state scoring nuances

Each state has its own data quirks, tag system, and metric availability. Here's what to know per state — these notes are mirrored on the Scoring Config page so you can reference them while tuning weights.

🟦 Montana (MT)

• Baseline state — all six universal metrics apply. Total Bulls, Total Harvest, Bull Success Rate, Harvest Success Rate, Bow Harvest Rate, and 6-Point Bull Rate all score normally for every MT unit.
• Public-land %, hunter pressure, and harvest density available, sourced from MT FWP GIS layers intersected with land-ownership polygons. CO, ID, and WY (elk) have since been added using the same Albers Equal-Area pipeline.
• Hunter counts are interpolated in odd years (2013, 2017, 2019, 2021, 2023) because FWP's voluntary phone survey is biennial. Affected records are marked with an asterisk (*) in Unit Reports.
• Tag & Draw matrix uses preference-point trend (drew-out-at pp slope).

🟧 Idaho (ID)

• Idaho elk uses a zone-tag system, not a statewide general license. Units are grouped into zones (Bannock, Bear River, Beaverhead, Pioneer, Sawtooth, etc.) with separate A-tag and B-tag NR quotas per zone. The Rankings table shows the zone name under each ID elk unit's State Rank badge. Resident zone tags are OTC. Nonresident zone tags now require a draw — 2026 is the first year all NR zone tags are drawn (previously first-come-first-served through 2025).
• Idaho deer is licensed by individual unit, not by zone. Each unit has its own NR tag quota plus optional controlled-hunt permits.
• Controlled-hunt draw odds loaded for both species: 184 deer hunts across 69 base units, 7 years (2019–2025), with per-hunt resident and nonresident draw percentages, applicants, and permits issued.
• No preference points — every Idaho controlled hunt is a random draw. The Tag & Draw matrix's Trend column uses resident-draw-percent slope instead of points-required slope (negated so "harder = positive" matches the other states).
• Mule deer data is derived from IDFG's combined whitetail+mule deer harvest reports, filtered using the published %Whitetail column. Units that are 99% whitetail (like Unit 11) correctly show very small mule deer numbers. Verified 100% against raw source.
• The Bull:Cow / Buck:Doe Ratio (7th metric) is not available for Idaho yet — units skip it without penalty when the slider is moved.

🟪 Colorado (CO)

• Only state with the 7th scoring metric — Bull:Cow / Buck:Doe Ratio. Sourced from CPW DAU herd-composition surveys: 135 elk DAUs and 185 deer DAUs across 2019–2025. This is a forward-looking indicator — bulls/bucks still walking around after the season, per 100 cows/does. Higher ratios usually mean lower hunting pressure on bulls and better mature-bull availability the following year.
• DAU-level data means multiple GMUs in the same herd share the same ratio. E.g., the Bears Ears DAU covers GMUs 3, 4, 5, 14, 214, 301, 441 — all get the same ratio score. That's how CPW publishes it, not a flaw.
• No statewide general elk license. Colorado uses an OTC + Primary Draw system — OTC eligibility is per unit, per season, per manner. The Tag & Draw table shows OTC rows in green at the top of the permit list, plus draw permits below.
• Tag & Draw matrix uses preference-point trend (drew-out-at pp slope) — same as MT.
• Public-land %, hunter pressure, and harvest density available for CO GMUs via the same KMZ-intersection pipeline used for MT.

🟥 Wyoming (WY)

• No bow vs rifle split. WYGFD reports combined harvest across all weapon types only. As a result, Bow scoring is unavailable for WY; the Bow option in Hunt Type is hidden when WY is selected. Rifle scoring uses the combined harvest total.
• No 6-point bull tracking in the source data — sixPtPct is set to 0 for every WY unit. Weight changes to bowPct and sixPtPct have no effect on WY rankings — tune those metrics around your MT / ID / CO units.
• WY mule deer adds virtual region "units" (RGN-A, RGN-B, …) alongside individual GMUs so nonresident Region general-license hunters can score the regions themselves. These virtual rows appear in Rankings alongside individual units when filtering by WY mule deer.
• Nonresident Mule Deer Region general license is valid in most units of its region, but some units within each region are limited-quota where the Region general is NOT sufficient and a permit must be drawn. These units show a red ✱ asterisk in the Region column on Rankings.
• Wyoming uses a preference-point system with separate NR and Resident draws. NR allocation is 16% of quota, further split 75% preference-points / 25% random within NR.
• Public-land %, hunter pressure, and harvest density now loaded for all three WY boundary layers (added 2026-05-13): elk units, mule deer units, and NR mule deer regions. Sourced from WY's three published boundary KMZs (elk units, deer hunt units keyed by their HUNTAREA field, and the 17 NR deer regions A–Y) intersected with WY's curated public-land KMZ. All three layers feed into a single runtime dispatcher that picks the right lookup based on the row's species and unit code (a unit starting with RGN- hits the region lookup; otherwise species selects between elk and deer).
• The Bull:Cow / Buck:Doe Ratio (7th metric) is not available for WY yet — units skip it without penalty.

Bow vs. rifle — two independent scores

The app computes two separate scores per unit: a Bow Score and a Rifle Score. This matters because the metrics that drive a great bow unit aren't always the same as those that drive a great rifle unit. A bow hunter, for example, cares deeply about archery-friendliness; a rifle hunter doesn't.

You can fine-tune how each weapon's score is calculated on the Scoring Configuration page. Every change you make there is saved locally and recomputes the rankings instantly. That's where you dial in the scoring to match your priorities — trophy potential, pure success rate, archery opportunity, whatever matters most for your hunt.

The year window — what "average" means

When you look at a unit's score, it's not based on one year — it's based on an average over a window of years. You control the window with the Score Year dropdown at the top of the Rankings page:

• Last 5yr Avg (default) — averages the most recent 5 years. Good balance of current relevance and sample size.
• Last 3yr Avg — averages the most recent 3 years. More responsive to recent changes; noisier.
• All Years Avg — averages every year of data we have. Stable but slow to reflect recent shifts.
• Specific year (e.g., "2024") — just that one year, no averaging.

For most hunt planning, Last 5yr Avg is the right choice. It smooths out single-year fluky years (bad winter, hunter numbers collapsed, whatever) while still weighting recent data heavily.

The data-cleaning that happens behind the scenes

A few things happen to your data before it hits the scoring system. You don't need to think about them day-to-day, but you should know they exist:

• Montana gap-year interpolation — Montana FWP doesn't publish hunter counts every year (odd years 2013, 2017, 2019, 2021, 2023 had no hunter data in the original source). For affected years, hunter counts are interpolated from adjacent years. Affected records are marked with an asterisk (*) in Unit Reports so you know they're derived, not measured.
• Idaho mule-deer filtering — Idaho's harvest data combines whitetail and mule deer in some units. The app extracts the mule-deer-only subset using Idaho's published whitetail percentage for each unit. Verified at 100% accuracy against raw source.
• Idaho deer controlled-hunt enrichment (added 2026-05-13) — IDFG publishes annual controlled-hunt drawing-odds tables; the app loads 7 years (2019–2025) across 184 hunts in 69 base units and attaches them to each unit at runtime. Hunt-area codes like 1-1, 14X, 11A-1X are normalized to their base unit. The other 31 base units have no controlled hunts and stay general-license-only. Idaho has no preference points, so trend arrows in the Tag & Draw matrix fall back to draw-percent slope (matches the elk implementation).
• Statewide rollup exclusion — agency reports sometimes include "statewide total" rows that would double-count if fed into the scoring. These are filtered out.
• Leading zero normalization — CO units labeled "061" and "61" in different years are merged to "61" so multi-year averaging works correctly.
• Wyoming pooled totals — WYGFD reports per-unit harvest broken out by license type (General, plus draw types Limited 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9). The app aggregates these into a single per-unit-year row using WYGFD's pooled total, then derives the Tag Access flag (general / permit / general+permit) from which license types are present that year. WY has no bow/rifle split and no 6-point bull tracking — both metrics are zero-filled for WY units.

📸 Screenshot needed: ss-scoring-config.png — capture the Scoring Configuration page showing the proprietary engine header, all six metric cards with sliders visible.

4. The Rankings Page

The Rankings page is your home base. It's a sortable, filterable table of every unit for the species and state you're looking at, scored and ranked by the engine described in Chapter 3. Everything else in the app flows from here — you find candidate units on Rankings, open a Unit Report to dig in, and send your finalists to Compare.

The filter bar — the three that change everything

The top three dropdowns set the shared context for the whole app. Change them here and they follow you to Reports and Compare; a "Viewing" chip in the top nav always shows where you stand.

• Species — Elk or Mule Deer. Switching species reloads the entire dataset and recomputes every score.
• State — MT, ID, CO, or WY. Scores are within-state, so the state you pick defines the field of competition (see Chapter 3 on per-state thresholds).
• Hunt Type — Bow or Rifle. This swaps the entire Score column between the bow-weighted and rifle-weighted composite. (Wyoming is rifle-only — the Bow option is hidden when WY is selected.)

The filter bar — narrowing the field

The remaining filters trim the table without changing the shared context:

• Score Year — the averaging window for the Score. Last 5yr Avg (default), Last 3yr Avg, All Years, or a single year. See Chapter 3 for why 5-year is usually right.
• Health — show only units Trending Up, Flat, or Declining over the last five years.
• Public Land Percentage — filter by accessible ground: Green only (> 50%), Exclude Red (> 20%), or Red only (≤ 20%). Units with no spatial layer are dropped from any public-land filter rather than shown as 0%.
• Tag Access — General (Res) – Draw (a general/OTC license is valid), Draw only (must draw a permit, no general access), or Region (Non Res) (Wyoming's virtual NR mule-deer region rows only).
• Min Score — hide everything below a composite-score floor.
• Min Years — hide thin-data units with fewer than N years on record (default 3).
• Search Unit — jump straight to a unit number.

Reading a row

Left to right, each row tells a story:

• # — position in the current sort order (not a fixed rank).
• Unit — the unit number, plus context tags packed into the same cell: a colored public-land dot, the tag-access badges, an ID-elk zone-name pill (gold), or a WY mule-deer Region pill (gold, red with ✱ for limited-quota carve-outs).
• Score — the composite for the current Hunt Type. This is the default sort.
• State Rank — where the unit lands within its own state's field.
• Health (L5yr) and Health % — the trend badge and the underlying percent change between the early and late halves of the last five years.

Public-land dot

• 🟢 Green — more than 50% public land.
• 🟡 Gold — 21–50%, mixed public/private.
• 🔴 Red — 20% or less, mostly private (it also gets a glow ring so DIY-unfriendly units jump out). Units without a spatial layer show no dot.

Tag-access badge

• GEN / OTC — a general license (MT/WY) or an over-the-counter option (CO) is valid here.
• GEN/OTC + DRAW n — general/OTC access plus n draw permits available.
• DRAW n (solid) — permit-only; you must draw, no general access. Hover any badge for the full breakdown.

The columns menu (⚙ Columns)

The table opens with the essentials. Click ⚙ Columns to toggle the full set of metric columns on or off: Harvest %, Bull %, Bull Harv %, Bull:Cow (CO only — grayed out elsewhere), Bow %, 6pt %, 6pt Bulls, Bulls, Harvest, Hunters, Public %, Pressure (hunters per public sq mi), and Harv /mi² (harvest per public sq mi). Columns without data for the current state show a dash and the checkbox is disabled with a "no data" note — so you always know whether a metric is genuinely zero or simply not loaded for that state.

Sorting

Click any column header to sort by it; click again to flip the direction. The little ⓘ on each header explains exactly what that column measures. Health sorts intuitively — descending floats Improving units to the top, ascending brings Declining ones up.

Selecting units to compare

Check the box in the Compare column for up to five units. A floating bar appears at the bottom showing your picks; click ⚖️ Compare Selected → to jump to the Compare Units page with those units loaded. ✕ Clear empties the selection. To open a single unit instead, click the arrow in the Report column.

📸 Screenshot needed: ss-rankings-main.png — capture the Rankings page for CO Elk showing the filter bar, several ranked rows, public-land dots, and tag badges.

5. The Unit Report Page

The Unit Report is the deep dive on a single unit. You reach it by clicking the arrow in the Report column on Rankings. Where the Rankings table gives you one row, the Unit Report gives you the whole history, the charts behind the scores, and the access picture.

The pinned header

As you scroll, a slim header stays pinned at the top showing the unit number, species, and its State Rank for the current Hunt Type — so you never lose track of which unit you're reading. The rank shown is filter-aware: it reflects the state and species you arrived with.

Score-by-year chart

The headline chart plots the unit's Bow and Rifle scores year by year, so you can see at a glance whether the unit is climbing, holding, or sliding. This is the visual behind the Health badge — a unit that looks great on a 5-year average but is trending down three years running tells a different story than its number alone.

The year-by-year data table

Below the chart is the raw record: every year of data for the unit, with hunters, total harvest, bulls/bucks, success rates, and the rest. Montana hunter counts that were interpolated for FWP's gap years are flagged with an asterisk (*) so you know which numbers are measured and which are derived.

Metric popup charts

Click into a metric and a popup chart breaks that single metric out over time. It's the fastest way to answer "is this unit's success rate actually improving, or did one good year pull up the average?"

State-rank gauge

A gauge shows where this unit sits in its state's distribution for the current weapon — the same State Rank from the table, rendered so you can feel how far above or below the median it is.

Access & Density

For states with a public-land layer (MT, CO, ID, WY), this section reports three things and ranks each one within the state with a small pill:

• Public-land % — the share of the unit that's huntable public ground, with its colored dot.
• Hunter Pressure — hunters per square mile of public land. Lower is better; the rank pill reads "Top 25% · least crowded" style, so #1 means the least crowded unit in the state.
• Harvest Density — harvest per square mile of public land. Higher is better; #1 means the most productive public ground per square mile.

Population & Sex Ratio (Colorado)

Colorado units add a Population & Sex Ratio panel from CPW's post-hunt herd-composition surveys — bulls per 100 cows (or bucks per 100 does). Thresholds: red ≤ 19 (low), gold 20–29, green ≥ 30. Higher ratios point to older bulls/bucks and better trophy potential. This is the data behind the CO-only 7th scoring metric.

Tag & Draw matrix

Every Unit Report includes the unit's tag-and-draw picture — OTC/general rows, draw permits, draw odds, and point trends. Because there's a lot to it, the full walkthrough lives in Chapter 9a — Tag & Draw Information.

Agency map link

Each report links out to the relevant state agency's official unit map, so you can pull the boundary and regulations straight from the source when you're ready to scout.

📓 Add to Journal

Every Unit Report has an 📓 Add to Journal button (and there's a compact 📓 icon on each Rankings row). One click captures that unit's key stats — score, public-land %, harvest success, years of data — into a new journal entry, pre-tagged to the unit, where you can add your own notes. It's the fastest way to build a shortlist as you research. See the Research Journal section below for the full rundown.

📓 The Research Journal

The Research Journal is your private notebook for working through units across states. Open it any time with the 📓 Journal button in the bottom-right corner — it's available on every page (Rankings, Unit Reports, Compare).

• Capture or type. Use Add to Journal to pull a unit's stats in automatically, or hit ＋ New entry to write a free-form note.
• Organize as you go. Tag entries to a unit/state, set a status — Considering, Shortlist, or Ruled out — pin important notes to the top, and search across everything.
• Print a report. The 🖨 Print report button lays out your entire journal, newest first, as a clean printable document you can save as PDF or print for the truck.

6. The Compare Units Page

Once you've narrowed to a short list, Compare puts your finalists side by side — every metric in one column each, with the strongest unit on each row highlighted. It's how you settle the "unit 76 or unit 80?" question.

Getting units onto the page

Three ways to load up to five units:

• From Rankings — check the Compare boxes, then click ⚖️ Compare Selected →.
• Quick Add — pick a state and type a unit number right on the Compare page.
• The A–E dropdowns — choose units directly in each slot.

A State filter on the page constrains the Quick Add and dropdown choices to one state at a time, which keeps things sane when you know you're comparing within a single state. Units you've already picked from another state are preserved even when you switch the filter.

The Wins tally

At the top (and repeated at the bottom) is a head-to-head Wins summary: for each metric, the unit with the best value scores a win, and the tally counts them up. It's a quick, honest scoreboard — the unit that wins the most metrics isn't automatically "the best" for you, but it tells you which unit is broadly strongest before you weigh what matters to you.

Winner highlighting

On every comparison row, the leading unit's cell is highlighted. Direction is metric-aware: for most metrics higher wins (harvest, success rates, 6pt bulls, public area, Bull:Cow ratio), but for a few lower wins — notably Total Hunters and Days/Harvest, where less crowding and more efficiency are better. If every selected unit ties on a metric, no winner is marked for that row.

The comparison spans quality and success, then volume (bulls, total hunters), then access and density (unit area, public area) — so you can read it top-to-bottom as "how good, how many, how accessible."

Expanding the charts

Click a chart to expand it in a modal for a closer look at the side-by-side trends.

Comparing up to 10 — and the printable report

You can line up as many as 10 units. Check up to 10 on Rankings and hit "Compare Selected," or use the Compare tab directly:

• ＋ More units reveals five extra slots (units 6–10). All selected units show on screen — units 6–10 appear shaded (with a "Report extra" tag) so the first five stand out, while the extras are still right there to scan. Selecting more than five from the Rankings checkboxes fills these automatically.
• 🖨 Print Report generates a clean landscape PDF of every selected unit: a header, the score-and-success charts redrawn with all units, and a head-to-head matrix — metrics down the side, one column per unit, with the leading unit starred (★) on every row — followed by the wins tally. Use your browser's print dialog to save it as a PDF or print a copy.

7. Scoring Configuration

This is where you make the engine yours. The Scoring Config page exposes the weights behind every metric, so the rankings reflect your priorities instead of a one-size-fits-all blend. Everything you change here saves locally and recomputes the rankings instantly.

Configuring per species

A toggle at the top sets whether you're configuring Elk or Mule Deer — and it switches the whole app to that species at the same time. Elk and deer keep separate weight sets, because what makes a great elk unit isn't always what makes a great deer unit.

The metric cards

Each scoring metric gets its own card with two weight sliders — one for Bow, one for Rifle. That's the key idea: the app keeps a Bow Score and a Rifle Score for every unit, and each has its own weighting. Crank Bow Harvest Rate up on the bow side and your bow rankings reshuffle toward archery-friendly units without touching your rifle rankings.

The cards cover the same metrics described in Chapter 3: Total Bulls/Bucks, Total Harvest, Bull/Buck Success, Harvest Success, Bow Harvest Rate, 6-Point Rate, and the Colorado-only Bull:Cow / Buck:Doe Ratio. Metrics that don't exist in a state's source data (bow and 6pt for Wyoming; the ratio for MT/ID/WY) simply have no effect on those units when you move the slider — the engine skips missing metrics without penalty.

How a score is built

The math is straightforward even though the exact thresholds are proprietary:

• Each metric is rated 1–10 by decile within the unit's own state (Rating 1 = bottom 10%, Rating 5 ≈ median, Rating 10 = top 10%).
• Contribution = rating × weight.
• Sum all contributions → the unit's Bow score and Rifle score.

Set a metric's weight to zero and it drops out entirely; give it a heavy weight and it dominates. A formula box on the page shows the live blend for the current species.

Unit Health Status

A sidebar card explains the Health badge: the last five years are split into an early half and a late half, and the percent change between them drives the Improving / Stable / Declining label (±5% is the Stable band). Health is a trend readout, separate from the score — a high-scoring unit can still be declining, and that's exactly the kind of thing worth catching here.

Rating Tiers

Below the cards, the Rating Tiers reference spells out what each 1–10 rating band means and how the composite scores map to quality tiers — your key for reading the numbers consistently across units.

8. Data Sources & Methodology

Every number in this app traces back to an official state wildlife agency. We don't model, estimate, or invent harvest data — we ingest what Montana FWP, Idaho Fish & Game, Colorado Parks & Wildlife, and Wyoming Game & Fish publish, clean it, and score it. This chapter is the honest accounting of where the data comes from and where its edges are. The in-app Data Sources page carries the same notes with the exact source URLs.

How each state reports harvest

🟦 Montana (MT)

MT FWP estimates harvest from a voluntary post-season telephone survey, not mandatory reporting. That has one big consequence: hunter counts aren't published every year. Odd years (2013, 2017, 2019, 2021, 2023) have no hunter data in the source, so the app interpolates those counts from adjacent years and flags the affected records with an asterisk (*) in Unit Reports.

🟧 Idaho (ID)

IDFG uses mandatory harvest reporting. Elk is organized by zone tag (resident OTC, nonresident draw as of 2026); deer is licensed per unit. Mule deer numbers are derived from IDFG's combined whitetail+mule-deer reports using the published %Whitetail column — verified 100% against the raw source. Controlled-hunt draw odds are loaded for both species (2019–2025), and because Idaho has no preference points, every controlled hunt is a pure random draw.

🟪 Colorado (CO)

CPW uses mandatory reporting. Colorado has no statewide general license — it runs an OTC + Primary Draw system, so the app loads per-unit OTC eligibility plus CPW's post-draw recap reports (2020–2026, elk and deer). It's also the only state with DAU herd-composition surveys, which power the 7th scoring metric (Bull:Cow / Buck:Doe). DAU data is herd-level, so GMUs in the same herd share a ratio.

🟥 Wyoming (WY)

WYGFD reports per-unit harvest broken out by license type but combined across all weapons — there's no bow-vs-rifle split and no antler-point (6pt) tracking, so those two metrics are zero-filled for WY. The app aggregates the license-type rows into a pooled per-unit total. Wyoming uses a preference-point system with separate resident and nonresident draws.

Why cross-state comparison carries a caveat

Scores and ratings are calibrated within each state (decile thresholds computed MT-vs-MT, CO-vs-CO, etc.). A Rating 10 always means "top 10% of that state," but the raw numbers behind a Montana 10 and an Idaho 10 differ because of state size, regulations, reporting method, and hunter effort. Use scores to rank units within a state; treat cross-state comparisons as rough guidance only. See Chapter 3 for the full reasoning.

The data-cleaning that happens behind the scenes

• MT gap-year interpolation — odd-year hunter counts derived from neighbors, flagged with *.
• ID mule-deer filtering — mule-deer-only subset extracted via the published whitetail percentage.
• Statewide rollup exclusion — "statewide total" rows are filtered out so they don't double-count.
• CO leading-zero normalization — units labeled "061" and "61" in different years are merged so multi-year averaging works.
• WY pooled totals — per-license-type rows aggregated into one unit-year row; tag-access flag derived from which license types appear.

9a. Tag & Draw Information

Right next to every Montana unit number on the Rankings page, you'll see one or two small badges that tell you what kind of tag you need to hunt that unit. This is the very first thing to check when planning a hunt — does this unit even allow general-license hunting, or does everything require a draw?

The three badge combinations

• GEN (green, alone) — General license only. A general elk tag is valid here, no permits exist or are required.
• GEN + DRAW N (green and gold) — Mixed access. General license is valid AND there are N optional permit opportunities (cow tags, archery-only seasons, etc.) you can apply for on top.
• DRAW N (red, alone — no GEN) — Permit required to hunt. Your general elk license is NOT sufficient — you must draw one of the N permits to hunt this unit. If you don't draw, you can't hunt. These are typically the famous limited-entry trophy units (Sleeping Giant 282, CMR 700, Missouri Breaks 620–630, etc.).

The visual cue: red is the warning. A red DRAW badge with no green GEN tells you upfront that you can't just show up with a general tag — you need to plan an application strategy and have a backup unit in mind in case you don't draw.

How to read the draw odds

The Tag & Draw Info section on each Unit Report shows a full table of every permit available, with:

• Quota — how many tags are issued for that permit each year
• Res / NR Odds — the draw odds at the final (minimum) preference-point level for that year, the same metric tools like OnX publish as "Odds / Min Points." The point level it drew out at is shown right below the percentage (e.g. @ 2 pp). Tags where everyone drew with no points needed show ~100% with no point level — those are effectively guaranteed.
• Apps · tags — applicants and tags drawn for that year, so you can see exactly how oversubscribed (or undersubscribed) the permit is

Color coding on the odds:

• Green ≥ 50% — you'll likely draw
• Gold 10–50% — possible but not certain
• Red < 10% — long shot, may need points or persistence

Resident vs. Nonresident — which am I looking at?

The draw-odds table shows one residency at a time. Use the Resident / Nonresident toggle above the table to switch. The selected side fills solid with a ✓ check — green for Resident, gold for Nonresident — and a matching colored bar right below the toggle spells out which set you're viewing ("👤 Showing RESIDENT draw odds & points" or "🌐 Showing NONRESIDENT draw odds & points"). Every permit row also carries a small R / NR pill next to its code as a third reminder. The table opens on Resident by default. This matters when cross-checking other tools — e.g. OnX's published unit odds are typically the nonresident numbers, so switch this toggle to Nonresident before comparing.

Colorado season dates

Every Colorado Unit Report shows a Colorado 2026 Season Dates reference block at the top of the Tag & Draw tab — the standard statewide season calendar so you can plan around it at a glance:

• Archery — Sept. 2–30
• Muzzleloader — Sept. 12–20
• 1st Rifle — Oct. 14–18 (elk only)
• 2nd Rifle — Oct. 24–Nov. 1
• 3rd Rifle — Nov. 7–15
• 4th Rifle — Nov. 18–22

Colorado runs four separate rifle seasons. 1st Rifle is elk-only — deer rifle seasons run concurrent with the elk 2nd, 3rd, and 4th seasons, so the deer report omits the 1st Rifle chip. These are the standard statewide dates from the 2026 CPW Big Game Brochure; some hunt codes (early/late, high-country, private-land-only, wilderness) carry their own unit-specific dates, which appear on each permit row in the draw table below the block.

The Tag Access filter

On the Rankings page filter bar, the Tag Access dropdown lets you narrow by tag system:

• Any — show everything (default)
• General (Res) – Draw — show every unit where a general license is valid, including units that also have draw permits (those extra permits are usually cow tags or specialty permits, not gates on hunting the unit). The general tag is the key — if you've got one, you can hunt the unit. The "(Res)" annotation reflects that residents are the typical applicants for general elk/deer licenses; nonresidents typically apply for region licenses on deer (see the Region option).
• Draw only — show only the limited-entry units that require a successful draw to hunt at all (no general license valid). These are the "if you draw" hunts — coveted but require backup planning.
• Region (Non Res) — Wyoming-specific. Show only the virtual region rows (RGN-A, RGN-B, ...) for WY mule deer. Each row sums the General-license harvest from that region's NR-Region-General-valid units across 2021-2025, so nonresidents applying for region licenses can rank and score the regions themselves.

Important caveats

Reference only — confirm against the official regulations. The hunt codes and permit codes shown in the Tag & Draw tab are provided for planning reference. A red note at the bottom of that tab links directly to each state's final published big game (elk & deer) regulations — always double-check your hunt code, season dates, quotas, and license requirements there before applying or hunting. Official regulation pages: Colorado (CPW) · Montana (FWP) · Idaho (IDFG) · Wyoming (WGFD).

Odds are estimates, not guarantees. The numbers reflect the most recent year's drawing — actual odds shift year to year as quotas, application volume, and hunter preferences change. Use these as directional guidance, not promises.

The data is currently MT-only. Idaho and Colorado will follow in future updates. ID and CO units don't show tag badges yet.

Hunt code suffixes decode into tag types. Permit codes like 410-20 or 270-45 follow MT FWP's classification. The "Tag Type" column shows you what kind of tag each permit is, decoded from the suffix:

Special application conditions (like "First Choice Only") are shown as small italics under the tag-type label. "First Choice Only" means the permit can only be drawn if you list it as your first choice — it's not eligible for second/third-choice picks.

Source: MT FWP Elk Permit Drawing Statistics Reports, 2021–2026 (annual publication). Six years of history power the per-permit trend arrows; latest-year numbers drive the displayed quotas and odds.

Multi-year trend indicators

Where 3+ years of data exist for a permit, you'll see a small trend arrow in the rightmost column of the permit table:

• ↑ Getting easier — resident draw odds have been trending up over recent years (more tags relative to applicants, or fewer applicants)
• → Stable — odds have been roughly flat year-over-year
• ↓ Getting harder — odds are trending down (more applicants chasing the same or fewer tags)
• — — not enough years of data for a meaningful trend

At the district level (in the Tag & Draw section header), an aggregate 📉 Trend: getting harder / → Trend: stable / 📈 Trend: getting easier badge summarizes the average direction across all the unit's permits. This is the single best at-a-glance signal of whether a unit's draw difficulty is shifting over time.

Trend arrows are computed using a linear regression of resident draw odds across all available years. The threshold for "trending" is roughly 1.5 percentage points of slope per year — anything inside that band gets called stable.

9b. Public Land Data & Access Metrics

For a DIY hunter, "how much of this unit can I actually walk onto?" is as important as how many animals come out of it. Three columns answer that: Public %, Pressure, and Harv /mi². They're loaded for MT, CO, ID, and WY.

How public land is calculated

For each unit we take its official boundary, intersect it with public-land ownership polygons in an equal-area projection (USGS Albers, EPSG:5070, so acreage is accurate), and report the share that's huntable public ground. Anything outside the unit — or outside the state — drops out of the intersection automatically.

What counts as "huntable" (varies by state)

• Montana — USFS, BLM, State Trust, FWP Wildlife Management Areas, USFWS, and similar huntable categories.
• Colorado — huntable federal only: BLM, USFS (incl. National Grassland), USFW refuges, and Bureau of Reclamation. Excludes private, state trust land, National Parks, and military (DOD) — those aren't open to general big-game hunting. (That's why a few SE-Colorado units sitting on the Piñon Canyon / Fort Carson complex read 0%.)
• Idaho — BLM, USFS, FWS/refuges, BOR, COE, and Idaho state lands.
• Wyoming — three boundary layers (elk units, mule-deer units, and NR mule-deer regions) intersected with WY's curated public-land layer.

Non-huntable categories — National Parks, military, city/county, roads — are excluded everywhere.

The color thresholds

• 🟢 Green — > 50% public. DIY-friendly.
• 🟡 Gold — 21–50%. Mixed public/private; expect to do some access homework.
• 🔴 Red — ≤ 20%. Mostly private — tough for DIY without permission or a lease.

Pressure & Density — measured on public ground only

Both metrics divide by public square miles (public acres ÷ 640), not total area, so they describe what's happening where you can actually hunt:

• Hunter Pressure = hunters ÷ public sq mi. Lower is better (less crowding).
• Harvest Density = total harvest ÷ public sq mi. Higher is better (more productive accessible ground).

On a Unit Report, each gets a within-state rank pill — e.g., "Top 25% · least crowded" — so you can see how a unit stacks up against the rest of its state, not just its raw number.

10. Filter Strategies — Finding Your Kind of Unit

The filters and columns from Chapter 4 are powerful in combination. Here are four worked recipes for common hunt goals. Each starts from your Species / State / Hunt Type, then layers on secondary filters. Hit ↺ Reset between recipes to start clean.

🏆 DIY Trophy

You want a big bull/buck on ground you can access yourself.

• Public Land → Green only (> 50%).
• Open ⚙ Columns and turn on 6pt % (trophy proxy) and, for Colorado, Bull:Cow.
• Sort by 6pt % (or Bull:Cow in CO) descending; set a Min Years of 5 so you're not fooled by a one-year fluke.
• Cross-check the Health badge — a declining trophy unit may be getting hammered.

🥩 Meat in the Freezer

You care about filling a tag, not antler size.

• Turn on the Harv % (Harvest Success) column and sort by it descending.
• Set Min Years to 5 for a stable success estimate.
• Don't over-filter on public land — a high-success unit with mixed access can be worth a few door-knocks. Use the Gold tier (Exclude Red, > 20%) as a floor.

🌲 Solitude Hunt

You'll trade some success for elbow room.

• Public Land → Green only, then add the Pressure column and sort it ascending (lowest hunters-per-public-sq-mi first).
• Consider Tag Access → Draw only — limited-permit units are quieter by design.
• Open a Unit Report and read the Access & Density rank pill to confirm "least crowded" standing in the state.

🌱 First-Timer / No-Draw

You want to hunt this year without burning points or risking a draw.

• Tag Access → General (Res) – Draw (or look for GEN/OTC badges) so a general/OTC license gets you in.
• Public Land → Green only for accessible ground.
• Set a modest Min Score and favor Health = Flat or Improving — you want a dependable unit, not a boom-or-bust one.

11. Understanding Trends & Health Status

The Health badge answers a different question than the Score. The Score says "how good is this unit?" Health says "which direction is it heading?" A unit can be high-scoring and declining — and that's exactly the kind of thing you want to catch before you commit.

The formula

Health looks only at the last five years. It splits that window into an early half and a late half (the middle year is skipped when a full five years are present), averages each half, and compares them:

Reading the direction

• ↑ Improving — late half more than +5% above the early half.
• → Stable — within ±5%.
• ↓ Declining — late half more than 5% below the early half.

The ±5% dead-band keeps normal year-to-year wobble from flickering a unit between Up and Down. The Health % column shows the underlying number if you want the magnitude, not just the arrow.

When to trust a trend — and when not to

• Watch the sample size. A unit with only 3–4 years of data, or very small harvest numbers, produces a noisy Health %. Use the Min Years filter (5 is a good floor) before leaning on trends.
• One big year distorts both halves. Open the Unit Report's score-by-year chart to see whether a trend is a real progression or a single outlier pulling the average.
• Health is weapon-specific. It's computed on the score for your current Hunt Type, so a unit's Bow health and Rifle health can differ.

Draw-table trends are a separate thing

Don't confuse the Health badge with the trend arrows in the Tag & Draw matrix. Those track how hard a unit is getting to draw over time — preference-point slope for MT/CO/WY, draw-percent slope for ID (which has no points). Draw trends follow the residency you're viewing and the visible year window. See Chapter 9a.

12. FAQ & Common Gotchas

The "why does it do that?" answers. (The in-app Hunt Research Assistant — the 💬 chat button — answers these too, and links straight back to the relevant chapter.)

Why do some Montana hunter counts have an asterisk?

MT FWP's hunter survey is biennial, so odd years (2013, 2017, 2019, 2021, 2023) have no measured hunter count. Those are interpolated from adjacent years and marked with * so you know they're derived, not reported.

Why are Idaho's mule deer numbers smaller than I expected?

Idaho reports whitetail and mule deer together in many units. We extract the mule-deer-only slice using IDFG's published whitetail percentage. In heavily-whitetail units (like Unit 11) the mule deer count is correctly small — that's the real mule-deer signal, not a data error.

Why can't I directly compare a Colorado score to an Idaho score?

Because ratings are decile-ranked within each state. A Rating 8 means "top of this state" in both — but the raw numbers differ. Same-state comparison is apples-to-apples; cross-state is rough guidance. (Full reasoning in Chapter 3.)

Why does a unit show "—" for Public %, Bull:Cow, Bow, or 6pt?

A dash means not loaded for that state-species combo, not zero. Public % needs a boundary layer; Bull:Cow is Colorado-only; Bow and 6pt don't exist in Wyoming's source data. The columns menu disables these with a "no data" note so you're never guessing.

Why do several Colorado GMUs share the same Bull:Cow ratio?

CPW publishes herd composition at the DAU (Data Analysis Unit) level — a herd that spans several GMUs. Every GMU in that herd inherits the herd's ratio. That's how the source is structured, not a bug.

Why is there no Bow option for Wyoming?

WYGFD reports harvest combined across all weapons. With no bow-vs-rifle split in the source, bow scoring isn't possible, so WY is rifle-only and the 6pt metric is zero-filled.

How current is the data?

Each state runs to the most recent year its agency has published; we add new years as they're released. A background watcher checks the four agencies weekly and flags when a new year appears. The app version and build are shown in the footer so you can confirm you're on the latest.

13. Troubleshooting

Quick fixes for the handful of things that occasionally trip people up.

"My filters changed when I switched tabs"

That's by design — Species, State, and Hunt Type are a shared context across Rankings, Reports, and Compare. The "Viewing" chip in the top bar always shows the current context. To clear the secondary filters without losing it, hit ↺ Reset.

"I just updated the app but don't see the changes"

The app is a single cached page. After an update, do a hard refresh — Cmd+Shift+R (Mac) or Ctrl+Shift+R (Windows) — to pull the new file. Confirm the footer shows the expected version/build.

"A unit isn't showing up"

Check three things: you're on the right Species and State; the Min Years filter isn't hiding a thin-data unit; and a Public Land or Tag Access filter isn't excluding it. The Search Unit box jumps straight to a number.

"The charts or table look empty on first load"

On first open the app processes ~14 MB of data — give it a few seconds. If it persists, hard-refresh. Your saved settings (filters, weights, show-history toggle) live in the browser's local storage; clearing site data resets them to defaults.

"Public % / Pressure shows a dash for my whole state"

That state-species combo doesn't have a spatial layer loaded yet. It's a coverage gap, not a bug — see Chapter 9b.

14. Glossary

Quick definitions for the terms you'll see around the app.