1. Define the place and governing scope
Research starts by identifying the public land, the jurisdiction that controls it, the land manager, and whether the available rule applies to an entire system, one property, a designated detecting area, or a narrower facility such as a managed beach.
2. Use the official-source hierarchy
- Current statutes, administrative codes, ordinances, and formally adopted regulations.
- Official land-manager policy pages, permit pages, maps, forms, and posted rule documents.
- Official agency notices or staff guidance that clearly identifies scope and authority.
Forums, social posts, hobby sites, travel guides, and commercial articles may reveal a research lead, but they cannot support a published legal status.
3. Extract only supported facts
The record captures allowed or prohibited areas, permits, issuer, process, tool or digging limits, seasonal or hour limits, found-property reporting, and other restrictions only when an official source states them. Unknown fees, expiration terms, coordinates, contacts, and boundaries remain null.
4. Assign one of five statuses
Explicitly allowed, permit required, restricted, prohibited, or unclear. Conflicting, outdated, incomplete, or scope-ambiguous evidence results in unclear and an instruction to contact the land manager.
5. Record evidence limits
Every record includes an original-language evidence summary, source publisher and title, official URL, publication date when known, exact date checked, ambiguities, and a manual-confirmation checklist. Archaeological, burial, tribal, historic, and sensitive-site protections are never reduced to location tips.
6. Require human approval before indexing
Machine-researched records are drafts marked pending human review. They carry noindex and are omitted from the production sitemap. Approval requires a person to open each official source, confirm its authority and present scope, resolve the checklist, verify the summary, and record reviewer identity and date.
7. Recheck before use
Even an approved record is a time-stamped informational summary, not legal advice. Visitors must check posted signs, closures, current permit procedures, and current land-manager instructions before detecting.