Methodology
How guidance is produced, how the tools reach their answers, and what has to be true before a claim appears on this site.
The framework everything is organised around
Every page on this site exists to advance one of five decisions. A page that does not is not a page; it is a topic, and topics are how a resource ends up with two hundred articles that nobody can act on.
How the tools work
A planning tool that scores privately is indistinguishable from one that makes its answers up. So an engine here is not a function with a switch statement inside it — it is a declared, ordered list of rules, and each rule carries the plain-language sentence shown to you when it fires.
The consequences are enforced in code rather than left to review:
- A rule with no explanation cannot be registered — the validator rejects it
- The methodology section reads from the same array the engine evaluates, so there is no second copy to drift
- Every published rule must be reachable, and the test suite proves it with fixtures
- Incomplete input produces no result at all, rather than a confident answer built on blanks
- Every tool publishes its limitations, and the list can never be empty
| Tool | Published rules | Published limitations |
|---|---|---|
| Contractor-type selector | 20 | 5 |
| Mulch-or-haul decision tool | 12 | 5 |
| Land clearing cost estimator | 22 | 5 |
| Site access checker | 17 | 5 |
| Quote comparison tool | 19 | 5 |
Why there are no prices
Publishing a dollar-per-acre figure would be the single easiest way to attract traffic to a site like this. It would also be invented. We have not seen your land, do not know your local disposal fee, and have collected no local price data — the dataset that would justify it is registered on this site and holds zero observations.
The cost estimator instead shows complexity against a stated reference project, with every multiplier published, and prints the one question to ask three local contractors. That is less satisfying and considerably more useful.
What has to be true before a claim appears
- It resolves a decision a landowner actually faces
- It is true generally, or it states plainly what changes it
- Where it depends on jurisdiction, it names the authority instead of guessing
- Where it depends on the parcel, it says so rather than implying otherwise
- It does not assert anything about a specific property, contractor, or permit
Sources
Every external authority is registered once, with the claims it is allowed to support and the routes permitted to cite it. A page citing a source for a claim it was never registered to support fails the build. See the registry and what its verification statuses mean.
Research
Datasets declare provenance, methodology, minimum sample size, and limitations before collection opens. No result is published below the declared minimum, and no synthetic observation may ever be added. Read the research methodology.
Corrections
Corrections are made in place and recorded in the revision log with the date and what changed. A correction is never made silently, and a page that has been corrected keeps the record.