What's New: Plats-First Scraping and 9 States

We've updated our BLM data pipeline to prioritize plat maps before field notes, and expanded coverage to nine western and plains states.

A quick technical update on the state of our BLM data coverage.

We now scrape and index BLM GLO records for nine states: Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and New Mexico. Alaska and North Dakota are not in the current BLM digital dataset.

We updated our pipeline to download plat maps first — these are the official township plats that show the surveyed sections, lots, and meander lines. Field notes are downloaded second, and only when the state has fewer than 1,000 field note documents (to keep storage costs reasonable for lower-volume states).

New Mexico is the one exception: with over 2,400 field note documents, we index the plats but skip the full field note downloads for that state. Field notes are available on demand for any specific township.

All uploaded field note pages are stored in our object storage and made available for OCR processing through the standard project workflow. Township plats are indexed and searchable by state, township, and range.