Data Sources & Attribution

GridCite screens land using public data. This page names every source whose publisher asks to be credited, and reproduces the credit in the form the publisher asked for.

The authoritative per-source licence analysis — including sources whose terms are ambiguous or restrictive, and what the product does about them — is docs/legal/DATA_RIGHTS.md in the repository. This page is the customer-facing summary of that document's attribution column, not a replacement for it.

Effective date: 2026-09-08

*Changed 2026-09-08 (previous effective date 2026-08-10): the CARTO "Muted" basemap was removed from the product, and the CARTO credit that accompanied it was removed from this page with it. No part of GridCite fetches a CARTO tile. A credit for a source we do not use is as much a defect as a credit withheld, which is why it comes off rather than being left standing as a courtesy. No other credit on this page changed.*

Basemaps

The default basemap is the OpenStreetMap Foundation's standard tile style, served from tile.openstreetmap.org and built from OpenStreetMap data.

© OpenStreetMap contributors

OpenStreetMap data is published under the Open Database Licence (ODbL), which requires attribution. The credits above appear on the map itself as well as here.

Aerial and topographic imagery basemaps come from the USGS National Map:

USDA, USGS The National Map: Orthoimagery. Data refreshed June, 2024.

USGS The National Map: Orthoimagery and US Topo. Data refreshed February, 2025.

Required credits

These publishers make attribution a condition of use, not a request.

California ISO — interconnection queue data.

Credit: California ISO.

CAISO's terms permit use provided all proprietary notices are kept intact and the California ISO is credited. Republication beyond that requires written authorisation.

Utah Geospatial Resource Center (UGRC) — parcel boundaries for Beaver and Millard counties, from the Utah SGID.

Contains data from the Utah Geospatial Resource Center (UGRC), licensed under

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Changes made: parcel geometries were reprojected, simplified for display, and

joined to assessor attributes. Acreage and zoning values shown in GridCite are

derived, not verbatim from the source.

CC BY 4.0 requires credit, a link to the licence, and a note of any changes made. All three are given above.

California Energy Commission — power plant name, fuel, capacity and status.

Source: California Energy Commission.

The Energy Commission's Conditions of Use make most of its material free for public use "provided the Energy Commission is credited". Whether the same terms also bar commercial use of this particular layer is genuinely ambiguous and is recorded as an open question in DATA_RIGHTS.md §0 F2 — but the credit is a stated condition on either reading of it, so it is given here.

U.S. Census Bureau — address and place geocoding.

This product uses the Census Bureau Data API but is not endorsed or certified

by the Census Bureau.

The Census API terms say a service "should display" this notice. "Should", not "must" — so this sits in this section as the stronger of the two available readings rather than as an established condition (DATA_RIGHTS.md §0.2 E5).

Requested credits

These publishers ask for credit without making it a condition. GridCite gives it anyway, because a reader who wants to check our work should be able to find the same data.

U.S. Geological Survey — 3DEP elevation, from which slope is derived.

USGS National Map 3D Elevation Program (3DEP).

U.S. Census Bureau — places, roads, and tribal land boundaries from TIGERweb, and the national place index from the Census Gazetteer files.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau

FEMA — National Flood Hazard Layer.

Flood hazard data from the FEMA National Flood Hazard Layer. FEMA has not

reviewed or approved this product. Only FEMA may change published flood-risk

information.

**New York State ITS / Office of Real Property Tax Services, and the contributing counties** — tax parcel boundaries and the owner of record for Ontario County, from the NYS Tax Parcels Public layer.

Source: New York State Information Technology Services GIS Program Office,

the NYS Office of Real Property Tax Services, and the contributing counties.

This is the only parcel source in the product whose licence text has actually been read. It carries no use restriction; the three bodies above are the attribution its own metadata names.

Public domain sources

These are works of the United States government, in the public domain under 17 U.S.C. § 105. No attribution is required; they are named so that our reasoning can be checked.

DHS / HIFLD — electric power transmission lines, and the substation locations derived from their endpoints — needs a sentence the list above cannot carry. The underlying dataset is public-domain federal data. **Our copy of it does not come from a federal host.** HIFLD Open closed in August 2025, and the layer is currently read from Esri's Federal_User_Community republication, whose item states "This work is licensed under the Esri Master License Agreement" and is titled "(Archive)". Naming only DHS/HIFLD here would describe where the data was published and not where we obtain it. Re-pointing at a federal host was attempted and is open work; see DATA_RIGHTS.md row 14.

State and local sources

County assessor offices publish the parcel boundaries and attributes that GridCite screens. Each county is named on the parcel record and in the coverage page, along with the date its data was retrieved.

Additional state sources include CAL FIRE (fire hazard severity zones), the California Department of Conservation (Williamson Act enrolment and Important Farmland), the California Energy Commission (power plants), Caltrans (traffic counts), and utility-published circuit and capacity data from PG&E and Southern California Edison.

Several of these carry terms that are ambiguous, purpose-limited, or absent entirely. Where a source's terms do not clearly permit what GridCite does with it, that is recorded in DATA_RIGHTS.md rather than assumed away.

Corrections

If you publish one of these datasets and the credit above is wrong, missing, or in the wrong form, tell us at the address on the Suggestions page and we will correct it.