Place-name, route, history, ecology, and respect checklist

• State the essay's governing question in one sentence.
• Draw the physical boundary of what you are claiming.
• Set the time period you examined.
• Name your relationship to the place, including who invited you or gave access.
• List permissions, permits, and closures.
• Say what a visit cannot establish.
• Avoid a title that promises a whole region from one road.

• Confirm the spelling and which feature it names.
• Separate official, historical, commercial, translated, and community names.
• Ask the people who live there which name they use, and in what setting.
• Check diacritics, capitalization, and pronunciation.
• Never build an origin story from a resemblance between two words.
• Attribute disputed etymology to whoever argues it.
• Withhold a name or coordinate when disclosure could harm a sacred or fragile site.

• Record start, end, stops, detours, and direction of travel.
• Note the map edition, scale, and date.
• Separate a mapped path from legal public access.
• Measure distance, elevation, and travel time instead of recalling them.
• Mark where each observation happened.
• Say which segments you did not visit.
• Check whether gates, crossings, and transit vary by season.
• Generalize coordinates near sensitive habitat or private land.

Route and map record

• Start, end, stops, detours, direction
• Map edition, scale, projection, date
• Mapped path vs legal access
• Elevation, distance, travel time checked
• Where observations occurred
• Segments not visited stated
• Gates, crossings, transit seasonal variation

• Build a dated table of changes to the place.
• Name builders, owners, workers, residents, users, and the people who decided.
• Prefer records made close to the event.
• Compare maps, noting differences in edition and coverage.
• Attribute oral memory and check its external details.
• Replace passive phrasing that hides removal, displacement, or policy.
• Distinguish a surviving feature from an original one.
• Flag when a historical label reflects its source's period, not current usage.

• Explain the project and where it will appear.
• Get permission before recording or entering nonpublic space.
• Never let one speaker stand for a whole group.
• Ask how knowledge may be attributed and whether it may be published.
• Pay guides and experts on the terms you agreed.
• Separate public information from knowledge entrusted to you.
• Give people a chance to answer material criticism.
• Check whether combined details defeat an anonymity promise.

• Confirm species identification with diagnostic evidence.
• Record season, time, weather, and how hard you looked.
• Keep presence separate from abundance.
• Keep local condition separate from regional trend.
• Check whether a species is native, introduced, invasive, or managed in that jurisdiction.
• Support causal claims with more than timing or proximity.
• Use the correct watershed, habitat, or administrative boundary.
• State uncertainty and the alternative explanations.
• Do not collect, feed, touch, call to, or approach wildlife for a scene.

• Review current site rules and hazards.
• Stay on established routes where required.
• Leave artifacts, rocks, plants, and trail markers where they are.
• Keep distance from wildlife and from nesting and breeding areas.
• Pack out waste and reporting materials.
• Do not mark a route with paint, cairns, tape, or flags.
• Match group size and noise to the place.
• Do not publish an inviting route to a site that cannot bear more visits.

Low-impact fieldwork rules

• Review site rules and hazards
• Use established routes where required
• Do not move artifacts, rocks, plants, markers
• Keep distance from wildlife and nesting areas
• Pack out waste and reporting materials
• Avoid paint, cairns, tape, flags
• Do not publish enticing fragile routes

• planning
• durable surfaces
• waste disposal
• leaving objects in place
• fire effects
• wildlife
• other visitors Land managers add their own rules on top, and access terms differ by site.

• Tie sensory detail to a time and a position.
• Replace scenic verdicts with physical relations and use.
• Mark what you measured, estimated, recalled, or inferred.
• Do not call an inhabited or worked place empty.
• Do not use residents as local color.
• Name the infrastructure, maintenance, and labor that shape the view.
• State how weather, season, money, or mobility shaped your access.
• Cut metaphors that assert facts the evidence cannot carry.

• Get permission when a person is identifiable and the context calls for it.
• Record creator, date, license, location, and any edits.
• Write alt text from what is visible.
• Do not stage unsafe or prohibited behavior.
• Strip precise metadata from images of sensitive locations.
• Caption what an image documents and what it does not prove.
• Credit maps and data under their own terms.

• Check every name, date, distance, direction, and unit.
• Compare quotations against recordings and surrounding context.
• Open every source at the sentence it supports.
• Confirm two sources do different evidentiary work.
• Correct any claim a source contradicts.
• Recheck access, closures, and conditions near publication.
• Run a harm review for people, habitat, sacred sites, and private property.
• Store the notebook, original media, source record, and corrections trail.