Hunt Research IQ — 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

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 takes nearly two decades of official harvest data from Montana, Idaho, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and Oregon — thousands of unit-year records for elk and mule deer (Oregon: elk) — 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 for both bow and rifle, using decile-based logic applied to up to seven harvest metrics.
• Deep dives on any single unit showing year-by-year performance, trend direction, draw odds and point history, and how it stacks up against the rest of its state.
• Side-by-side comparisons of up to ten units with automatic winner highlighting, a head-to-head wins tally, and a printable report.
• Access intelligence for Montana, Idaho, Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah — public land percentage, hunter pressure per square mile of accessible ground, and harvest density — pulled from official GIS boundaries. (Oregon's GIS layers are in processing.)
• 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 biologist. It won't tell you:

• How to access a unit — we tell you how much public land exists, but not where the trailheads are. (That's a job for Google Earth Toolkit IQ.)
• 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 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 — the other three suite tools (Chapter 1a) are built for exactly that.

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.

1a. The Hunt IQ Suite — All Four Tools

Hunt Research IQ is one of four tools in the Treeline Hunt IQ Suite. They share one login, one workflow, and one goal: take you from "where do I even start?" to a researched, planned, e-scouted Western hunt. This chapter is your map to the other three — what each one does, when to reach for it, and how to get rolling.

One login covers everything. Your suite access is tied to your Treeline Academy membership: enter the email you signed up with, get a 6-digit code, and you're in for about two weeks per device. The IQ menu in the header of every tool jumps between them — or launch any tool directly from the links below.

The workflow — four tools in hunt-planning order

1. Know the rules → State Intel IQ — deadlines, draw mechanics, fees, point systems.
2. Find your unit → you're here — Hunt Research IQ. Rankings, unit reports, draw odds, comparisons.
3. See the ground → Google Earth Toolkit IQ — e-scout your finalist units in Google Earth Pro.
4. Execute the plan → Hunt Planning IQ — build hunt areas and track your prep to opening day.

The full hub with all four tools lives at iq.treelineacademy.net.

🌍 Google Earth Toolkit IQ

Launch Google Earth Toolkit IQ →

What it is: eleven Western statewide datasets — topography, slope, motor-vehicle use, snow, fire history, unit boundaries, public land, and more — bundled into a single file that installs into Google Earth Pro (the free desktop app) and turns it into a serious e-scouting workstation.

When to use it: the moment you have finalist units out of Research IQ. This is where map study turns into hunt areas — seeing access, terrain, and the features that hold animals before you ever burn a tank of gas.

Getting set up (one-time, the Toolkit page walks you through it):

1. Install Google Earth Pro (free desktop version — not the browser or mobile app).
2. Download the Toolkit bundle from the Toolkit page — one file, all states and layers included.
3. Open it in Google Earth Pro; it lands in Temporary Places. Drag the whole Toolkit into My Places.
4. Save immediately: File → Save → Save My Places. Skipping this step is the #1 cause of "my layers disappeared."
5. It connects to the Treeline server automatically from there.

🗻 Hunt Planning IQ

Launch Hunt Planning IQ →

What it is: a guided hunt-plan builder and checklist that tracks your hunt-area development toward the season. A Hunt Plan holds the basics — year, species, state, unit, dates — and under it you build up to ten Hunt Areas, each with its own checklist, logistics, and journal. A progress bar shows exactly how ready you are.

What each Hunt Area tracks:

• Access points and camps — with distance, elevation change, and auto-calculated hike times between them. Set your personal on-trail/off-trail pace once and every camp updates.
• A built-in Hike Time Calculator (modified Naismith formula) for estimating any leg of the hunt.
• Offline-map verification — a checklist that your OnX / Gaia / other map apps actually have the area downloaded before you're out of service.
• A species-specific planning checklist — switch the plan's species and the checklist swaps to match.
• An Area Journal — dated, taggable notes (Map Review, Glass, Access, Camp, Forecast, Strategy) so your e-scouting observations live with the area they belong to.

When to use it: start a plan the day you commit to a hunt — don't wait for draw results. New here? Load the sample hunt plans (Elk and Bear) to see a fully built plan before making your own. You can also copy a developed hunt area into another plan, full setup included.

🧭 State Intel IQ

Launch State Intel IQ →

What it is: a done-for-you quick reference on each state's hunting regulations for elk and mule deer — distilled from the official state brochures into one scannable page per state: application deadlines, draw mechanics, true all-in license costs, season timelines, what changed this year (and what it means for you), public-land access by region, and the non-resident traps that cost hunters seasons.

How to use it: pick your state and species, then start with the "Pick your situation" section — find the row that sounds like you (0-point DIY hunter, point burner, once-in-a-lifetime trip) and it hands you this year's three moves. The Key Dates table and Watch Out For list are worth a re-read every application season. An Ask button (bottom-right) answers questions grounded in the official state brochure.

Coverage: Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and Utah are all live (more Western states to follow). It pairs naturally with this tool: Intel tells you the rules of the game, Research IQ tells you the odds of your hand.

2. Getting Started

Opening the tool

Hunt Research IQ runs entirely in your browser at iq.treelineacademy.net/research — nothing to install. Sign in with your Treeline Academy membership email (you'll get a 6-digit code; sessions last about two weeks per device). Once loaded, the data work happens locally in your browser, and your 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.
• 🗺️ State Heat Map — A clickable map of every unit, color-shaded by IQ Score (or any metric, draw odds, public land, terrain, and more). Hover for a full Unit Profile Card; click to pin a unit's profile in the left panel — score and state rank, health, access, terrain, elevation, and a 📊 Harvest Table pill that opens the full year-by-year harvest table without leaving the map. One click on from there to the report or your journal.
• ⚙️ 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, 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. The state buttons are built from the app's own state list, so every state the tool carries is offered here — nothing to keep in sync as new states land.
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 Weapon 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 the State Heat Map — your state, coloured by your freshly personalised Hunt IQ score. You have just described how you hunt; the map answers where visually, and every unit is one click from its full profile. The Rankings page is right there in the nav when you want the same answer as a 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 📄 report icon 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 Type, Min Score/Years, Search) while preserving your current Species, State, and Weapon Type.

Shared context across Rankings and Reports

Three filters — Species, State, and Weapon 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, 8 years (2019–2026), 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 Weapon 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 Type 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).
• Weapon 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.
• Tag Type — 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 — type a unit number to jump straight to it, or click ▤ Select Units to open a checklist of every unit in the current Species + State and tick one or more to compare side by side. A gold “N units ✕” chip shows your active picks (click it to clear); typing in the box again clears the picks.

Hunt Class — Idaho's general vs controlled hunts (elk & deer)

When you select State = Idaho (elk or mule deer), an extra Hunt Class dropdown appears with two options: General Season and Controlled Hunts. Idaho reports these as two completely separate harvest datasets — controlled hunts are limited-draw tags and run much higher success — so the app never blends them.

• General Season (default) — the general-license harvest, exactly as the rest of the app works.
• Controlled Hunts — the Idaho units re-score and re-rank against each other on their controlled-hunt data (scored in their own pool, so your General scores are never affected). This is the only way a few areas — the Owyhee (40/41/42) and Hells Canyon (11/13/18) zones, which have no general elk season — show up with real numbers instead of zeros. Units without controlled hunts drop out of this view.

Mule deer note: deer controlled hunts (2007–2025, added 2026-07-02) are mule-deer-derived using IDFG's published %Whitetail per hunt — the same derivation as the General deer data — and the unit report's controlled table shows the whitetail share in a %WT column. The toggle only appears for Idaho (that's the data we have); other states are always General. In either mode you can open a unit's report and use its own General / Controlled toggle in the Harvest tab to see both datasets side by side, and the Draw Odds Explorer still lists every controlled hunt individually.

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 Weapon Type. This is the default sort. Click the 📊 icon beside any score for that unit's score-trend chart, windowed to your Score Year selection.
• 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.
• MT scope suffixes — on Montana elk units the GEN badge tells you what the general license actually covers (from the FWP regs): plain GEN = either-sex (any elk) · GEN BULL = any antlered bull · GEN BTB = brow-tined bull/antlerless (no spikes) · GEN SPIKE = spike or antlerless only · GEN COW = antlerless ONLY — every bull in that unit requires a drawn permit (e.g. HD 417). Hover the badge for the exact regulation rows. The same scope appears on the Unit Report (header badge, intro sentence, and general-license banner) and in the Unit Brief's Tag-type pill — e.g. HD 380 reads "General (spike/antlerless ONLY) + Draw permits" — on desktop, phone, and the printed brief.
• MT deer — GEN (WT) — on Montana deer units where the general deer license covers whitetail (either-sex) only, the badge reads GEN (WT): you can hunt whitetail on a general license, but the mule-deer buck requires a drawn permit (17 HDs, e.g. 319, 380, 417). Units where both mule deer and whitetail are general show a plain GEN.
• GEN/OTC + DRAW # — general/OTC access plus that many (#) draw permits available.
• DRAW # (solid) — permit-only; you must draw, no general access. Click any badge for the full guide, or hover for the unit-specific 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 ten units. A floating bar appears showing your picks — the first five are your main comparison; picks 6–10 appear shaded with a "✦ shaded = will show on report" note, matching how they render on the Compare page and in the printable report. 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 📄 report icon 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 Weapon 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 every state (MT, CO, ID, WY, UT — all carry a public-land layer), 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

📄 View Report — the printable unit dossier

Every unit card has a 📄 View Print Report button (next to Add to Journal). It builds a clean, print-ready dossier of that single unit, just like the Compare report: a header with state rank and health, three charts (score, harvest %, and hunters by year), a summary table of every key metric averaged over your selected Years window, the full year-by-year data table (window years marked •), and a latest-year Tag & Draw snapshot per permit. Hit 🖨 Print / Save PDF to take it offline, or 🔗 Share to send it as an image. Perfect for the truck, the print binder, or texting a hunting partner.

The Research Journal is your private notebook for working through units across states. Open it any time with the 📓 Journal button in the page header, or the self-labeling 📓 Show Journal / 📓 Hide Journal pull-tab on the right edge of the screen — both are available on every page (Heat Map, 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 Category — General, Priority, or To Do — pin important notes to the top, filter the list to one category, and search across everything.
• Read long notes your way. Long notes show a short preview in the list so the panel stays scannable — click ▾ Show more to expand inline, or hit ⛶ to open the note in a full-window view with a big editor: read comfortably, add text, and Save.
• Print your journal. The 🖨 Print Journal 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 →.
• The A–E dropdowns — choose units directly in each slot (use ＋ More units for slots F–J).

Comparisons are single-state by design — scores are calibrated within each state (Chapter 3), so apples-to-apples means same-state. The State filter is shared with Rankings and Unit Reports: pick Montana anywhere and all three pages follow. Switching state on Compare clears units picked from the previous state so you always start a clean same-state matchup.

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.

6a. The Draw Odds Explorer

The 🎟️ Draw Odds tab flips the app's perspective. Rankings and Reports start from the unit and drill into its tags; the Draw Odds Explorer starts from the tag — every drawable permit and general-license option laid out as one flat, sortable table, one tag per row. It's built for the question every applicant actually asks: "What can I realistically draw this year, and is it worth drawing?"

Coverage note: the Explorer covers all five states (elk and mule deer), selectable in the filter bar. The states draw differently and the table respects that: Montana permits are a bonus-point random draw (odds shown are draw rates; points multiply chances), while Colorado is a preference-point draw (the pill shows the point level the hunt drew out at — above it you're essentially in, below it you're not). Colorado's unlimited over-the-counter licenses appear as OTC rows. Draw data for ID and WY still lives on each unit's report page.

Reading a row

• Year — the draw year the Odds column comes from (each tag's most recent year of published results). Most tags show the current year; a dimmed older year means the agency hasn't published that tag's newest drawing yet, so read its odds with that in mind. Residents' OTC general rows show "—" — there's no drawing to have a year. Retired hunt codes (no draw results in the last two years) are hidden entirely — their old odds say nothing about today's draw.
• Unit — click the unit number to jump straight to its full Unit Report.
• Hunt Code — the official FWP permit code (e.g. 270-45). Rows marked with a green GENERAL badge represent the general-license option in a general-access unit; on Montana elk rows the badge carries the same scope suffix as the Rankings GEN badge (BULL / BTB / SPIKE / COW), and hovering it explains the full tier system plus this unit's exact general-license rows from the regs. A blue ↪N tag means the permit is homed in unit N but valid here too; on the permit's home row, a blue +N tag means it's also valid in N other units — hover it for the full list (e.g. 620-21 covers 620, 621 and 622; regional B licenses like 007-00 cover all of 700–705) — the odds are the permit's, the quality stats are this unit's.
• Tag Type / Weapon — decoded from the permit code: Either-Sex, Antlered Bull, Antlerless/Cow, B-License, Archery, and so on.
• Odds — the latest-year overall draw rate for the selected residency. Green ≥ 75%, gold 35–74%, red < 35%. Montana special permits are a bonus-point random drawing: points are squared into extra chances, so more points improve your odds — but unlike a preference-point system, no point level guarantees a tag, and the number shown is the across-all-applicants draw rate. On GENERAL rows, nonresidents see a 🎫 Combo draw button instead of a percentage — the combination license is one statewide drawing (identical odds in every general unit), so clicking it opens the full odds-by-point-band table with trend charts. Residents see OTC: they buy the general tag over the counter.
• 5-Yr Draw Trend — draw-difficulty direction computed over the tag's last five years of draw data, written out so there's no squinting: ↑ Harder, → Stable, or ↓ Easier. Same thresholds as the arrows everywhere else in the app (the Glossary covers the math). The 📊 icon opens the same draw-trend chart as the Unit Report's Tag & Draw matrix — points-required and draw-% lines over the same 5-year window (the combo point-band chart on GENERAL rows).
• Harvest % / Score / Unit Ranking / Public % — the unit's headline numbers, repeated on every one of its tag rows so you can sort tags by unit quality without flipping tabs. Score and Ranking follow the global Weapon Type (bow/rifle). The 📊 icon next to each score pops up that unit's score trend chart — with 🏹 Bow / 🎯 Rifle toggle buttons — and a link through to the full report. The chart's window follows the Rankings Score Year filter (Last 5 / Last 3 / All Years; a single-year pick falls back to last 5).
• Tags / Apps — latest-year tags drawn vs. applicants for the selected residency (e.g. 8 / 113) — the raw contested-ness behind the Odds percentage. GENERAL rows show the statewide combo-drawing volume.
• Season Dates — the statewide Montana season for the tag's weapon (2026: archery Sep 5–Oct 18, general rifle Oct 24–Nov 29, muzzleloader heritage Dec 12–20). General-license rows show both archery and rifle windows. Caveat: B-licenses and shoulder seasons can run outside these dates — always check the FWP district regulations.

The table is built for big lists: the column headers stay pinned while you scroll down, the first four columns (State, Year, Unit, Hunt Code) stay pinned when you scroll sideways, and a second scrollbar above the table lets you slide left-right without scrolling to the bottom first. The Species selector in the filter bar is the same shared context as everywhere else in the app — switching it here switches the whole app.

"Your Points" — personalized odds on every row

Enter your point total in the Your Points box and the whole table personalizes. (Idaho rows never change — Idaho has no point system at all; every applicant gets the same random odds.) In Wyoming (nonresidents) it resolves the 75/25 split: above the preference cutoff you'd have drawn in the preference phase (~100%), at the cutoff you get WGFD's actual rate among applicants at that point level, and below it you get the 25% random-pool odds. In Colorado it's a preference-point threshold: above the hunt's drew-out-at level you show ~100%, at the level you get CPW's published rate among applicants at that level, below it 0%. In Montana it uses two FWP datasets that match the state's two drawing systems:

• GENERAL rows (preference points): exact band lookup from the NR combination-license drawing stats — at 2 points you see the 2-point band's rate, at 3+ you see ~100%.
• Permit rows (bonus points): the actual result at your point level from FWP's Detailed Bonus Point Drawing Statistics — e.g. "of the 4 nonresidents who applied for 217-10 holding 3 points, 2 drew = 50%." Hover the pill for the sample size. If nobody applied at exactly your level that year, the pill shows a ~ estimate from the squared-ticket lottery model (points²+1 chances) applied to that year's real applicant pool — the same math onX uses.

Read small samples with care: a point level with 3 applicants can swing from 0% to 100% year to year. The tooltip always shows how many applicants the number is based on. A handful of older hunt codes aren't covered by FWP's detailed stats; those keep the all-applicants rate and say so on hover.

Utah — estimated odds (modeled). Utah limited-entry hunts run on a lottery: half the tags go to the highest-point applicants and half are a random draw where your points are squared (10 points = 100 tickets). That makes the raw "what percent drew at exactly N points last year" almost meaningless — at most levels nobody happened to draw so it reads 0%, while one lucky 0-point winner can read 2%. So for Utah we show an estimated probability instead (marked with a ~): your realistic chance at each point level, modeled from the most-recent draw's full applicant pool run through Utah's 50/50 squared math. Click any Utah odds cell (look for the small 📈) to open the draw-odds detail — an estimated-odds curve with a point slider and Res/NR toggle on top, and the actual record underneath: the point level the hunt drew out at, the top-points-vs-random split, and the year-by-year results. The curve is a model; the record is the real UDWR draw data, kept exactly as-is. (General-season buck deer is a preference draw, not bonus points, so it keeps the observed rate.)

Wyoming general (regional) rows: Wyoming's general elk/deer license is issued by region (elk: Eastern / Southern / Western), not per unit, so each unit in a general region now shows a General — [Region] row built from that region's regional-general drawing odds (data begins 2024). These are nonresident figures (NR Regular or NR Special, following your Residency pick) and personalize with Your Points like the limited rows. On the Resident tab the general row shows as general access without a draw percentage — Wyoming resident draws are a random drawing by choice (no published per-point odds), so the Your Points box is disabled for Wyoming residents.

Colorado & Idaho (added 2026-07-02) — every state now has the 📈 detail, on both the Explorer and each unit's Tag & Draw section. Colorado permit rows open a preference-draw modal: a step curve set by the latest recap's drew-out-at point (below the cutoff = 0%, at the cutoff = CPW's published at-final-point rate, above ≈ 100%) with a point slider and Res/NR toggle, plus the year-by-year recap record — the same math as the Your Points column. Idaho has no preference points — every controlled hunt is a pure random draw — so its modal skips the slider and shows the honest picture instead: resident and nonresident odds by year (through 2026), applicants, drawn, and permits.

Filters and sorting

Filter by residency (nonresident is the default), tag type, weapon, minimum odds, or a unit/code search. The unit search is literal — typing 79 returns only unit 79 (never 791); type a hunt code (or part of one with letters/dashes) to search codes instead. The Tag Type list is built from the actual tags in the data — every label that appears in the table (Brow-tined Bull, Antlerless B-License, Archery Either-Sex, and so on) is filterable, and the list updates automatically when you switch species. Click any column header to sort; click again to flip direction. The default view opens on Montana · Elk · Nonresident, sorted by unit number, and the ↺ Reset button returns you there with all filters cleared.

6b. The 🎯 Tag Finder

The Rankings page answers which units are good. The Draw Odds Explorer answers what can I draw. The Tag Finder answers both at once: it lists individual draw tags, grouped under the unit they hunt, and lets you filter that list by how the country actually hunts. Open it from 🎯 Tag Finder in the top nav, from the 🎯 Find Tags button on the Unit Reports filter bar, or — on a phone — from the gold 🎯 Find Tags button on the Heat Map.

The questions it asks

The left panel is a short interview. Answer as many or as few as you like; every answer narrows the list immediately.

• State & Species — shared with the rest of the app, so changing it here changes it everywhere.
• Residency — nonresident by default. There is a matching Resident / Nonresident toggle in the draw-odds popup itself, so you can flip it while you're reading a unit's tags instead of going back to the filter panel; the two are the same setting and always agree. This is not just a change of percentages — several states publish a different list of tags per residency. Idaho elk returns 164 tags that exist only for nonresidents and 93 only for residents, Colorado elk has 148 resident-only, and Wyoming swaps roughly 55 either way. Arizona is the exception: it runs one combined draw, so the two residencies read almost identically.
• Wyoming's three-way. In Wyoming the control offers Resident, NR Regular and NR Special — the Special draw is a separate, higher-fee product with its own and generally better odds. No other state has it, so the third button only appears on Wyoming.
• What you're after — Any / Bull / Spike / Cow (elk) or Any / Buck / Doe (deer). Bull and Buck include general licenses, because a general elk license is effectively a bull tag. Spike and Cow are restrictive: they show only tags specifically scoped to that class. Either-sex and "any elk/deer" tags appear under both Bull and Cow.
• Tag type — general license vs. limited / special draw permits.
• Weapon / season, and Your points, which personalizes the estimated odds shown on each tag. Not every state publishes a weapon on every tag \u2014 where none of a state's tags carry one (Montana, Idaho and Wyoming deer today) the control is replaced by a note saying so, rather than four buttons that all return the same list. Arizona's HAM hunts (handgun / archery / muzzleloader) correctly satisfy both the Archery and the Muzzleloader filters.
• Show tags where my odds are — Any / 5%+ / 20%+ / 50%+ / 80%+, applied to those personalized odds. This is the control that turns a point balance into a shortlist: enter 12 points, set the floor to 20%, and you are looking only at tags you have a real chance at. A percentage is used rather than a point threshold because a threshold only exists in preference-point states — in a bonus-point lottery there is no level that guarantees anything, only better odds. Guaranteed general tags always pass; tags with no odds on file drop out once the floor leaves Any.
• Ground — Remote Core (backcountry vs. road-accessible), Timber vs. Open, and Terrain steepness. These come from the same measured terrain pipeline as the Unit Brief (see Chapter 9d).
• The sliders — minimum public land, harvest success, bull/buck harvest %, 6-point (or 4-point) rate, how good a unit, and 5-year improvement. Each one is a floor: leave it on Any and it does nothing.
• How good a unit deserves its own note. It used to be a minimum Hunt IQ score, which told a casual user nothing — 480 is only meaningful if you know that state's range, and the range moves with the state and the weapon. It is now a percentile: drag to Top 20% or Top 1% and you get exactly that slice of the state, measured against every ranked unit in it — the same rank printed on each unit's IQ pill. A live line under the slider spells it out in units, so Top 10% reads as “the best 20 of Montana's 196 ranked elk units”. The percentile is taken against the whole state, not against what your other filters have left on screen, so a top-10% unit stays a top-10% unit however you search.

Filters you will not always see

The filter stack is built for the state and species you are looking at, so a control only appears when there is data behind it. Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico publish no 6-point bull / 4-point buck rate, so that slider is absent there and present in Montana, Idaho, Oregon and Nevada. New Mexico deer additionally has no buck-harvest figure. A short line at the foot of the stack names whatever was dropped for your current view.

This is deliberate rather than cosmetic. Every numeric filter treats a missing value as a fail, so a slider with nothing behind it doesn't return a smaller list — it returns none at all, the moment you nudge it off Any. Showing it would be offering a control whose only possible effect is to empty your search. If you had that filter set in a state that does have the data and then switch to one that doesn't, the setting is cleared rather than left filtering invisibly.

Reading the results

The count above the list leads with units — “196 units · 377 tags” — because the list is one row per unit; the tag total is still there as the cue for how much sits folded behind the 🎫 buttons.

The results read as one row per unit. Each row carries the unit number, a colorized Hunt IQ pill with its rank in the state, a 5-year improvement pill, and two action buttons. Both pills are clickable: either one opens the year-by-year Health Status graph for that unit — the same chart the Health badge on the Rankings page is derived from — so you can check whether a strong 5-year average is still climbing or has been sliding for three years running.

• ⛰ Terrain Info — how the unit hunts, on one scrolling panel. Up top, a block of measured figures: Tree Cover (timber share, open share and average canopy density), Terrain Steepness, public land, road and trail density — each ranked against every unit in the state that carries the same figure — then harvest success, bull/buck rate, 6-point rate, improvement and Hunt IQ. Below that sit three full-width cards built by the same code as the Unit Brief, so they can never disagree with it: the Remote Core distance selector (½ through 5 miles — see Chapter 9d), the elevation low/high/mean with the share of the unit in each 1,000-ft band, and the moisture focus-band card that tells you how high to hunt this year. The 📊 icons open that metric's by-year chart without leaving the finder. Elevation and moisture appear only where that state's pack covers the unit.
• 🎫 Draw Tags/Odds — the number on this button is how many tags in that unit matched your filters. Click it and they unfold underneath; click again and they fold away. A search that spans a whole state can return several hundred tags, and printing them all at once buried the units — the point of the finder is to compare units first and then open the one you care about. Whatever opens is exactly what your filters left standing, never the unit's full inventory.
• 📍 / 📓 — two quick actions on every unit row. The waypoint opens the onX Web Map centered close on the unit (and copies its center coordinates); the notebook opens your Research Journal with that one unit pre-filled — no need to save the whole result list just to keep one unit.

Each tag row shows: tag name, hunt code, general-vs-limited, species, weapon, season dates, points-to-draw, and an estimated-odds pill (green ≥ 75%, gold ≥ 35%, red below). Guaranteed general tags read Available rather than a percentage. Where a tag needs points, the cell reads about 24 pts to draw — "about" because the figure is modeled from recent draws, not published by the state. Where the odds pill reads no data, we have no draw record for that tag; that is not the same as 0%, which means people applied and none drew.

Season dates, weapon and species

Every tag row carries the season it hunts, in all nine states — but the states publish that at three different levels of detail, and we show what each one actually gives rather than inventing the rest:

• Exact dates per tag — Colorado (per hunt code), New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Oregon, and Idaho's controlled hunts. This is the real season for that specific tag.
• The statewide season for the weapon — Montana, which publishes no per-tag season. Treat it as the general window, not the tag's own dates: B-licenses and shoulder seasons run outside it.
• A link to the regulations — Wyoming, where seasons vary by hunt area and license type and aren't carried in the draw data at all.

Where a tag has no season on file the row simply omits it. That is deliberate — the alternative is showing a date that belongs to a different hunt.

Weapon reads Any legal weapon rather than a bare "Any" wherever the tag carries no weapon. The distinction matters: in these datasets a blank weapon means either "valid with any legal weapon" or "this state doesn't publish one per tag", and the source data can't tell them apart. Colorado and New Mexico carry a weapon on every tag; Montana on about 4% and Wyoming deer on none. Hover the cell for the caveat, and check the season table in the regulations before you apply.

The draw-odds popup

At the foot of an open tag list, Full draw odds table ↗ opens that unit's complete popup — every tag it offers regardless of your filters, laid out with weapon, season dates, points, applicants vs. tags, and a link on to the full Draw Odds Explorer.

Once you have entered your points, tags also pick up a confidence badge read off your personal odds: ✓ Should draw at 80% or better, Good shot at 40% or better, and nothing below that. It is deliberately based on odds rather than on clearing a point threshold, because six of the nine states run bonus-point lotteries where no threshold exists.

On a phone

The Tag Finder has a layout of its own in phone mode. Results come first — the tag list fills the screen — and the filters live in a bottom sheet behind the gold ⚙ Filters bar at the top, which shows a count of how many answers you've given. Tap it, work through the questions, and the footer button tells you what you're about to get ("Show 38 units · 142 tags") before you tap back to the list. Units stay collapsed here too — tap 🎫 Draw Tags/Odds on a unit to unfold its tags — and the Terrain Info and full draw-odds popups open full-screen on top and close back into your results. The ↺ button beside the Filters bar clears your answers while keeping the state and species you picked.

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 (2019–2026), 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. On Montana units, the Tag & Draw card shows both sides: the general-license intel (every unit the general tag covers, plus the nonresident combination-tag draw odds and trend charts) above the limited-permit drawing matrix.
• 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 (Beartooth WMA 455, CMR 700, Missouri Breaks 620–630, West Fork Bitterroot 250, 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.

🎯 Your Points (Montana): enter your bonus-point total in the box next to the residency toggle and a gold @ your pts column appears in the drawing matrix — your personalized odds for every permit, from FWP's detailed bonus-point statistics (actual results at your point level, with the sample size shown; ~ marks a modeled estimate where nobody applied at exactly your level). The same number drives the Draw Odds Explorer's Your Points filter — set it in either place. Remember both pages personalize for the residency currently selected.

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 Type filter

On the Rankings page filter bar, the Tag Type 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. Wyoming units add a fourth, Wyoming-only column — Wilderness % — because of the state's nonresident guide law (see below).

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.

Wilderness % — Wyoming only

Wyoming law bars nonresidents from hunting a designated wilderness area unless accompanied by a licensed professional outfitter/guide or a qualifying resident guide. That turns wilderness coverage into a real planning number — a high-wilderness unit can put a DIY nonresident hunt effectively off the table, or add several thousand dollars in guide fees. So for Wyoming we compute, per unit, how much designated wilderness it contains.

We intersect each unit's boundary with the USFS designated-wilderness layer in an equal-area projection, then report the result as a share of the unit's PUBLIC land (wilderness acres ÷ public acres) — not a share of the whole unit. We use the public-land denominator on purpose: it answers "of the ground I can actually hunt here, how much carries the guide requirement?" (The whole-unit share is also stored internally and tends to be a point or two lower.)

Turn the column on from ⚙ Columns (it's Wyoming-only, so it shows greyed with a "no data" note when you're viewing another state). The same number appears in the Heat Map unit panel under Public Land, and a fuller 🏔️ Wilderness Area Breakdown — sq mi, acres, and the named wilderness areas — appears on the Unit Report. Color thresholds:

• ⚪ Plain — < 25% wilderness. Most public ground is open to DIY.
• 🟡 Gold — 25–49%. A meaningful chunk requires a guide — plan your access carefully.
• 🔴 Red — ≥ 50%. Half or more of the huntable ground is wilderness; budget for a guide or look elsewhere.

You can also filter by it directly with the Wilderness dropdown in the Rankings filters (e.g., "No wilderness" for a pure DIY shortlist).

9c. The Unit Brief

The Unit Brief is a single, rich pop-up read on any unit — a window you can open from anywhere a unit appears (Rankings row, Unit Report, Heat Map, Draw Odds Explorer). Where other tools hand-write a paragraph or two per marquee unit, every line of a Unit Brief is generated from the data we already hold. That's the whole point: it covers every unit in every state, refreshes when the data does, and every statement traces back to a number.

The one hard rule: describe terrain, don't predict from it

Elk and deer thrive in open country and in timber depending on the area — cover alone predicts nothing. So the Brief keeps a strict line:

• Terrain, cover, land cover, and access are stated as neutral facts — "42% shrub-steppe," "8% timber," "17.9% public." No "great for elk," no habitat-to-quality leaps.
• Good / bad / recommendation language is allowed only when it rests on a measured statistic (harvest success, buck:doe ratio, multi-year trends, draw odds) and lives exclusively in the Statistical Highlights section.

If a claim can't point to a measured number, it's a description, not a judgment.

What's in a Brief

• Header + descriptor chip — a neutral, factual chip such as "Open country · limited public access · 2,765 sq mi." No species, no quality claim. Beside the title sits the 📍 waypoint button (also on every Unit Report card and in the Heat Map's unit panel): one click opens the onX Web Map in a new tab, centered close on the unit's middle (about a 1-mile scale — the screen center is the spot; zoom out a notch to see the whole unit), and also copies the unit's center coordinates in decimal lat, long — ready to paste into onX's search bar or a waypoint if you want a pin. The point is guaranteed to fall inside the unit boundary (a plain centroid can miss on horseshoe-shaped units).
• Hunt IQ Summary — 2–3 sentences of orientation: where the unit sits, nearest town, how big, the kind of country, and the headline access reality.
• Land Cover & Tree Canopy — the NLCD land-cover breakdown (stacked bar + legend) plus USFS tree-canopy density (mean canopy % and dark-timber share). Live for Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado; Oregon's layers are in processing. All factual.
• Statistical Highlights — the only section that makes good/bad calls, and only from measured stats. Top-decile metrics surface as strengths, bottom-decile as watch-outs, plus multi-year trend callouts ("harvest up 5 straight years"). It carries an Elk / Mule Deer toggle — a unit can be strong for one species and mediocre for the other — and the Draw & Tag Outlook swaps with that same toggle.
• Hunt IQ score box — the unit's 0–400 score plus its statewide rank and percentile, per species.
• Access, Pressure & Elevation — public/private ownership bar, road & trail density, Wilderness %, the Remote Core with its ½–5 mile selector (Chapter 9d), the distance-from-road bands, and the elevation distribution.
• Similar Units — nearest neighbors in statistical scoring space, for discovery.

The Brief opens from every surface a unit appears — Rankings and the Draw Odds Explorer (the 📋 button), Compare cards, the Heat Map's unit panel, and the Unit Report — and its footer jumps straight to the full Unit Report. The 🖨 Print Brief buttons produce a clean one-page dossier (print or save as PDF), including a Remote-Core-by-distance strip in place of the interactive slider.

How it's generated (accuracy first)

Facts are assembled by deterministic templating — sentences built directly from data fields. A light natural-language pass may smooth phrasing, but it never invents facts, and hard data is kept separate from any narrative. We deliberately do not pull from private user journals or community notes (a privacy line, and unverifiable).

9d. Remote Core & Terrain Metrics

Remote Core is our headline remoteness metric — and the single most meaningful pressure signal we carry, because animals respond to how far ground sits from a road, not to any line on a map. Definition:

Remote Core = the share of a unit's public land that is more than ½ mile from a road.

And because the underlying calculation measures the distance for every point, the ½-mile cutoff is user-adjustable: a ½ · 1 · 2 · 3 · 4 · 5-mile selector lets a hunter ask "how remote do you want it?" A unit can look decent at ½ mile and collapse to nearly zero by 3 miles (open, roaded country), while a wilderness unit still holds most of its ground out at 5 miles.

How Remote Core is calculated

It's a raster distance calculation, done per unit:

1. Take all the roads in and around the unit (USGS National Transportation Dataset).
2. Lay a fine grid over the unit (90-meter cells for the ½-mile headline; 150 m for the wider bands).
3. "Burn" the roads onto the grid — every cell a road passes through becomes a road cell.
4. Run a distance transform: every other cell gets its straight-line distance to the nearest road cell. Now every point knows exactly how far it is from a road.
5. Overlay the public-land mask (PAD-US) so only huntable public ground is counted.
6. Remote Core = (public cells beyond the chosen distance) ÷ (all public cells).

Two deliberate choices: distance is straight-line (not hiking distance), and roads just outside the unit boundary still count — a road across the line still reduces the remoteness of ground near it. The ½-mile default comes from the Hillis elk-security model, the recognized threshold for ground where mature animals hold.

The other terrain metrics (same pipeline)

• Road density & Trail density — miles of road / non-motorized trail per square mile. The classic "how roaded is it" numbers. A bare figure is hard to read — 2.26 mi/mi² means nothing until you know what the rest of the state looks like — so both now carry a state ranking wherever they appear (Unit Brief, Unit Report, and the Tag Finder's Terrain Info panel): a plain-English read, the unit's rank, and the percentile behind it, e.g. Lightly roaded · #13 of 186 CO units · fewer roads than 92% of CO units. The rank is taken against the units that actually carry that figure, not the state's whole unit list, and the direction differs by metric — #1 is the fewest roads, but #1 is the most trails, since roads bring pressure and trails buy you access. Hover the rank for a reminder.
• Wilderness % — share of the unit inside designated Wilderness. This is the permanence signal (see below).
• Roadless % — Inventoried Roadless + Wilderness + WSA combined. Computed and stored, currently hidden from the Brief to avoid confusion.
• Elevation distribution — from a DEM, the share of the unit in each 1,000-ft band, plus min/mean/max. (Elevation is skipped where no state DEM is available.)

Remote Core vs. Wilderness — they answer different questions

They look similar but aren't: Remote Core measures how remote a unit is right now (distance from roads, any ownership of remoteness), while Wilderness % measures how much of that remoteness is permanently protected. A unit can show 0% Wilderness but 66% Remote Core — genuinely remote country that carries no protection and could be roaded later. When the two roughly match (e.g., a 96%/96% Beartooth unit), the backcountry is both real and permanent.

Data sources & how it's served

• Roads & trails — USGS National Transportation Dataset (per state).
• Public land + Wilderness/WSA — USGS PAD-US.
• Roadless — USFS Inventoried Roadless Areas (folded in via PAD-US designations).
• Elevation — 3DEP / USGS DEMs.

Everything is free, public, and computed offline — the app never touches these rasters at runtime; it reads pre-computed per-unit JSON, exactly like harvest and draw data. Because roads, wilderness, and terrain barely change year to year, this is effectively a compute-once dataset.

9e. The Terrain IQ Page

The 🏔️ Terrain IQ tab is a stand-alone explorer for one question: where does hunting pressure thin out? It lists every unit in all nine states — 1,121 in total, with Wyoming and Utah split into their elk and deer boundary sets, since those species use different unit maps — and ranks them by Remote Core: the share of a unit's public land beyond your chosen distance from a road.

• Remote beyond — the ½–5 mile selector re-ranks the whole table live. Half a mile finds ordinary walk-in country; crank it to 3–5 miles and only true pack-in backcountry survives.
• Steepness — median slope of the unit's public land in degrees, with a 🥾 icon that opens the full grade breakdown (0–45°+). Public-land portion only; from a 30 m DEM.
• Cover — three separate reads, and they answer different questions. Tree Canopy % is USFS canopy density averaged over the unit (bare ground counts as 0%). Timber % is the share of the unit NLCD calls forest. Open % is the share that is shrub-steppe or grassland. Timber and Open do not sum to 100 — water, wetland, barren rock and human land use make up the balance. All three are whole-unit figures, not public-land-only.
• Columns — Wilderness (designated Wilderness as % of public land), road & trail density (miles per square mile of unit), Public %, area, and elevation range. Every column sorts on click; the highlighted green column is Remote Core.
• ⛰️ elevation icon — opens the unit's elevation distribution in 1,000-ft bands, as percentages of the unit. Pair it with Remote Core: high and roadless is where pressure disappears.
• State chips + ▤ Select Units — the same Search-By-Unit checklist as Rankings, scoped to the active chip; the 📄 Brief button on each row opens that unit's Unit Brief.

All figures come from the measured terrain pipeline (USGS National Transportation Dataset roads/trails, PAD-US ownership, USGS DEM) — the same numbers behind the Unit Brief and the heat map's Remote Core variable. They describe access and remoteness, not hunt quality.

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 / Weapon 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 Type → 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 Type → 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.

The Heat Map's unit panel

Pinning a unit fills the left panel with its profile. The big number is the IQ Unit Score, and the line under it carries the unit's place in the state — Rank #12 of 196 · Top 5%. That line used to be duplicated by a separate State Rank row further down; the row is gone and the percentile moved up, which buys the room for the 📊 Harvest Table pill.

The pill sits on the right, directly above the Showing X-year averages label, and opens the unit's complete year-by-year harvest table in its own window — the same table as the Unit Report, with a 📊 on every column that charts it by year. It opens on whatever year window the map is set to, and carries its own Last 3 / Last 5 / All years buttons so you can re-cut the table without repainting the map behind it. Rows marked ✕ excl. fall outside the selected window and don't count toward the AVG row at the bottom.

Grouped areas — Idaho's zones and similar — use a different panel and don't carry the pill yet, because the table would need to aggregate several units per year.

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 Weapon 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.

Which states does the Draw Odds Explorer cover?

All six states — elk and mule deer for Montana, Idaho, Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah; elk for Oregon — pick the state in the Explorer's filter bar. The Explorer is a different view of draw data, not the only home for it — every unit's report page carries the full draw history too.

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.

"A Montana elk unit's harvest stops early but it still shows permits"

Montana FWP split several elk hunting districts into sub-units, and harvest is reported under the new names. HD 411 → 411E / 411W (after 2020), 391 → 391N / 391S, 701 → 701E / 701W, 580 → 580N / 580S. The original unit's report ends at the split year and shows a gold banner pointing to the successor units. Permit codes kept the base number, so the Tag & Draw tab may still list later years — that's expected. Deer keeps whole district numbers, so deer units are unaffected.

"My filters changed when I switched tabs"

That's by design — Species, State, and Weapon 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 Type filter isn't excluding it. The Search Unit box jumps straight to a number, or use ▤ Select Units to pick several units from a checklist at once.

"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.