Our Methodology

Boatzia's national baseline is the USGS boat ramp inventory (via ScienceBase), which aggregates public boat launch records contributed by state agencies across the country. For states where a state wildlife or natural resources agency publishes a richer public dataset — currently Florida (FWC), Michigan (DNR), Wisconsin (DNR), and Minnesota (DNR) — we use that agency's data instead, since it typically includes more detail (fees, lane counts, amenities, surface type) than the national baseline.

Every ramp record is normalized into a common schema — location, county, hours, fees, lanes, amenities, water body — so ramps from different source agencies can be searched and compared consistently across state lines.

Records without valid coordinates or a name are excluded rather than guessed at. Where a record's county could not be reliably determined, or where a record was tagged to the wrong state, it's dropped rather than shown with incorrect location data.

For the 47 states covered by the USGS baseline, several fields (fees, lane counts, specific amenities) are often not available in the source data — we show what the source agency actually publishes rather than filling gaps with assumptions. If a field is blank on a ramp page, it means the source data doesn't specify it, not that the ramp lacks that feature.

We do not publish user-submitted reviews or star ratings on ramp pages — every data point traces back to a named public agency source, which is why you won't see fabricated review counts anywhere on the site.