Data sources and attribution
What Ghost Town reads, how it credits it, and where public reporting runs out.
Categories of source
Fishing reports
Reports published by fly shops, guide services and angling clubs. These are the richest source of what is actually happening on a water: what is hatching, what is working, how it is fishing. They are also local, partial and commercially motivated, which is why they are treated as evidence to be weighed rather than fact to be repeated.
Management and agency notices
State, national and regional fisheries authorities publish regulation changes, closures, stocking activity and fish-health notices. These are authoritative for rules and closures — and Ghost Town points to them rather than restating them, because the official notice is the one that counts.
Environmental measurement
Flow and stage gauges, water temperature, snowpack and snow-water equivalent, drought monitoring and weather. These are numeric, continuous and comparable across years, which is what makes historical framing possible.
Biological and hatch reference
Entomological and lifecycle reference material used to reason about what should be available to fish at a given stage of the season, and which imitations correspond to it.
How sources are attributed
- Evidence carries its source and, where one exists, a link back to the original.
- Ask Ghost Town lists the sources behind an answer alongside the answer.
- Ghost Town summarises and reasons over sources; it does not republish them wholesale.
- Where a source is behind a paywall, in another language, or only available as a periodic bulletin, that limitation belongs to the evidence and is not hidden.
Global coverage and language
Fishing information is not published evenly across the world. Some fisheries have decades of daily shop reports; others have a seasonal club bulletin in a language other than English, or nothing at all. Ghost Town deliberately reads beyond English-language North American sources, and where coverage is thin it says so rather than presenting a confident answer built on one post.
Where public reporting runs out
No amount of source coverage tells you what the water will do on the day you are standing in it. Reports lag, gauges fail, and a fishery can change faster than anyone publishes about it. Ghost Town is built to narrow the range of surprise, not to eliminate it — and to be clear about which it is doing.