PIN is not a credit listing. Listings already exist, they are cheap, and copying one adds nothing. What is missing sits on either side of the listing. On one side, the eligibility question the register makes you answer by hand. On the other, the demand forming upstream in impairment and permitting data that the credit market never sees until it arrives. PIN was already carrying both, for reasons that had nothing to do with mitigation banking.
Enter a project location. The screen runs against the live caches and returns what covers the point, what is merely near it, and what the receiving water looks like.
Read live from the source caches on each page load. A source that has not refreshed says so instead of showing a number from an earlier build.
Most of these upstreams publish only a current value and overwrite it. An unrecorded day cannot be bought back later from anyone. PIN records daily and differences the record, which is what turns an overwritten balance into a rate.
Eligibility, not proximity
A bank can only compensate a site inside its approved service area. PIN tests the point against the real service-area polygons instead of drawing a radius, and reports what covers the site. Coverage still is not a determination, so the answer is labeled as service-area verified and links back to the register.
Demand before supply
Credit demand starts upstream of the credit market, in impairment listings, TMDLs, permits and new industrial load. PIN already tracks those signals nationally, so a watershed can be read for where obligation is forming rather than only for what is currently on the shelf.
The register is incomplete, and we say by how much
The public mirror PIN reads under-reports approved banks by roughly 31 percent against a Corps export, concentrated in a few states. That gap is measured and published beside the data rather than absorbed silently, because a missing bank looks exactly like an absent one.
Movement, not a snapshot
Where balances publish, they publish as a current value that gets overwritten. PIN records a daily snapshot and differences it, which turns an overwritten number into observed drawdown. This is the one part of the picture that cannot be bought later, because the history nobody kept is gone.
Monitoring evidence, compiled
For the annual monitoring report that goes to an interagency review team, PIN compiles the ambient federal context automatically and stamps its provenance. The sponsor still owns the field verification. Machine sourced counts as filled, never as attested.
Nutrient and water quality trading
Trading programs run on the same evidence but sit outside the section 404 register. Where a state publishes bank level inventory, PIN carries it with its real limits attached, including which nutrient is actually covered and whether a unit was ever published.
Annual monitoring evidence compiled and stamped, and a read on where the next service area is worth siting.
Which banks and in-lieu fee programs actually cover the site, checked against the polygons rather than a radius.
Watershed diligence before site selection, using the same impairment and permit record the regulator uses.
A record of what the register said on a given day, including what changed and what quietly disappeared.
- Service-area coverage is verified against the published polygon. It is not legal eligibility. Credit type, availability and the district determination all still apply.
- The Corps register publishes no credit balances through any machine-readable channel, so PIN tracks section 404 supply inventory and never presents it as availability.
- In-lieu fee records do not say whether a program sells aquatic or species credits, so PIN does not infer it. The link goes back to the register.
- State nutrient inventory is carried as published. Where the source covers only phosphorus, it is labeled that way, and where the source publishes no unit, none is invented.
- An empty result is reported as unknown when the upstream failed. It is never rounded down into a finding that nothing exists.