This page answers what the thing is before it asks you to agree to anything, because nobody should agree to something they have had to guess at. Fifteen points. Two of them are questions we have not answered yet, and they are marked as questions rather than smoothed over.
144 m² on a fixed global grid, identified by its cell — h12:383060:-844610 — which names the ground exactly. The cell is recorded to you, nobody else can be given it, it appears on the public map, and it lasts, including past your own lifetime. That is the whole of it.
Not a deed, title, lease, easement, licence to occupy, or any interest in real property. Holding a cell changes nothing about who owns the ground.
A claim gives you no right to enter, cross, use or be on the ground it names. The actual owner’s rights are completely unchanged — a private landowner, a state, a tribe, a national park. Trespass is still trespass on a cell you hold. Much of this grid falls on land where entry is restricted or prohibited outright, and some of it is designated Wilderness. We put this third rather than in a footer because a map showing you a specific square recorded under your name invites exactly one dangerous misreading, and this is it.
Not offered as one, and — see point 9 — structurally not one, because it cannot be sold. We do not run a marketplace and never will, we publish no prices or valuations, and we will not record a new name against a claim.
Before the agreement, not after it, because a person deciding whether to be listed is entitled to know what being listed means.
The name you choose to be listed under, and which cell you hold. If you send them, and only if you send them: a portrait, a short biography, and a note about the ground.
Your email address, your payment details, your postal address, or any location of yours other than the cell itself. Not your equipment. No time finer than the day.
The cell id is exact and is all the register needs. A coordinate to six decimal places is about 11 cm of precision on a 12 m square — roughly a hundred times finer than the unit — and there is nothing this map does that 11 cm makes possible and 11 m prevents.
Open question — whether a holder may also be listed anonymously, or as “a holder”, or not at all. Today the answer is that a name goes up, and we would rather say that plainly than imply an option that does not exist yet.Nothing about a holder is published until that holder has agreed to it. First, not afterwards — agreement given later cannot cover something already published.
This page has been wrong about a holder before, and you should know it from us rather than from the code. Until 30 August 2026 the map displayed a holder who did not exist — an invented name, biography, quote and portrait — with nothing on screen marking it as a placeholder, so it read as a real person holding real ground. It was found, removed, and the data file now says real holders only, twice, because of it. Separately, in September, a real contributor’s street address and the timing of his filming were published here and have been taken down. We are not claiming a clean history. We are claiming a checkable one: the mistakes are written down in the project’s own record, which is why we can tell you about them.
You may not sell, assign, transfer, licence, lend, rent or pledge a claim, and any attempt to do so is void and of no effect. The register will not record a change of holder. A claim is worth what the register says, and the register will not write somebody else’s name against yours.
You may name one successor, and change that nomination whenever you like. On reasonable proof of death the claim is re-registered to them, once. They hold it on these same terms and may name a successor in turn. It is personal at every point in its life, and it still outlives you.
If you want your money back, ask. We will not make you justify it, and we do not treat it as a dispute. Write to us, we will help you, the claim is released, and the refund is returned to you.
One thing we cannot undo: the register keeps a record that a claim existed here and was later released. That record is a hash and a date in a log that can only be added to — it is what lets anyone check that nothing here was quietly changed, including by us. It holds nothing about you.
California, and any dispute goes to the California courts. There is no arbitration clause and no class-action waiver, deliberately — a clause that strips your remedies is not something we want in a document written to be read.
Right now, one person: Josh Kloss, in Los Angeles. There is no company yet, so your agreement is with him personally and he is the one answerable to you for it. A company is being formed to take this over. When it exists, this page will name it and the agreement will move to it — on the same terms, or you will be asked again.
If you also film an ecoregion and send it in, that is What you agree to, which has its own terms including your right to withdraw what you uploaded. Holding ground and uploading footage are separate things, and neither one requires the other.