Substriva is a record of what public documents say about public land across Victoria. All 79 Victorian councils are listed. Each received a first-pass attempt: a logged automated search. 71 of those searches completed and could be assessed; 8 of those searches were blocked by the council's site and could not be assessed in the same way. A search is not a review of a council's records, and it does not mean a council takes part in Substriva. The place layer begins with the Gardiners Creek reference corridor.

Discovery is automated. A search of each council's public pages looks for candidate sources and is logged with its date and outcome. A logged search is not a review.

Before anything becomes a published record, a person reads the source document, enters what it establishes and what it leaves open, and stores the link, the date it was published, when it was retrieved and a hash of what was retrieved. Publication is a separate, later decision. Nothing appears without that trail.

This is the rule the whole thing is built around, so it is worth stating plainly. When a place shows no public record:

We did not locate a relevant public record in the sources checked. This does not mean the land is untreated, and it does not mean anything is being withheld. It means our search of the listed sources did not find a document, and the sources we checked are listed below.

Councils and agencies hold far more information than they publish, and publishing practice varies enormously between bodies. A quiet page here is a fact about our search, not about the land or the people managing it.

A present-day observation is only one point in time. Substrate, vegetation, weather, maintenance and other site conditions can change between an earlier intervention and a later observation. Substriva therefore preserves temporal context alongside place.

That timeline is evidence context, not a causal conclusion. A documented intervention does not establish that it produced a later outcome, and a missing record does not establish that an intervention never occurred.

Evidence is separated by kind and never blended. Only the first kind is published in this reference corridor.

Document. A published record from the body responsible, or from another public authority. This is all you will see here for now.

Witness. A person’s direct observation, including photographs. A photograph of vegetation change shows vegetation change; it does not establish what caused it, and it is never promoted into a document claim.

Instrument. A measurement from a device or a laboratory, with its method attached.

Inference. A conclusion drawn from other evidence, shown with the reasoning and its inputs.

Hypothesis. An open question with no settled answer, kept open rather than quietly resolved.

It would be easy to turn record counts into a league table of councils, and it would be wrong. The number of records we hold for a body reflects how much of its area we have checked and how it happens to publish, not how well it manages land. Comparing bodies on that basis would produce a confident-looking ranking of our own search effort.

If comparison is ever added, it will be on measurable properties of publication such as completeness, freshness and spatial precision, and it will say so.

Substriva does not tell you whether land is safe to walk on, garden in, or let a dog run through. It holds no soil or water measurements. It does not identify plants or fungi, and it will not tell you where to find any species. It is a document ledger.

If you need to know about conditions at a specific place, contact the land manager named on that page. Places in the reference corridor.