The Open Record
Observation, analysis, accountability — examining the boundaries carefully.
Ground Truth & Governance is an independent public-interest research and evidence archive examining environmental change, monitoring and institutional response around Preston New Road and the wider Fylde landscape.
The archive brings together repeat aerial and ground photography, satellite imagery, LiDAR elevation comparison, field measurements, historical records, regulatory documents and technical literature. Its purpose is to preserve observations through time, identify relationships that may not be visible from isolated inspections, and make the resulting evidence available for scrutiny.
The work began with sustained documentation of Preston New Road during its development and operation. As the image and documentary record grew, it became possible to compare the same fields, water bodies, drainage features, road margins and engineered surfaces across multiple years. The archive has since expanded to include Peel Hill Farm, the Ballam Road corridor and other connected parts of the Fylde landscape.
The reports consider several connected subjects:
These subjects are presented together because environmental behaviour does not necessarily follow administrative boundaries. A change first visible in a field, drain, road verge or water body may have relevance to several monitoring and regulatory domains.
The project uses a simple three-stage method:
Observation — record what is visible or measurable without assigning a cause.
Comparison — examine the observation against earlier and later imagery, nearby locations, LiDAR, satellite data, field measurements and documentary sources.
Interpretation — consider plausible relationships, alternative explanations and the further evidence needed to distinguish between them.
Descriptions, measurements and hypotheses are kept separate wherever practicable. The archive does not treat an unusual image as proof of a mechanism, nor does it assume that the absence of a recognised threshold exceedance establishes the absence of meaningful change.
The central value of the record lies in persistence, recurrence and spatial-temporal coherence: what appears, where it appears, how it changes and whether related expressions recur elsewhere.
Environmental evidence does not become actionable through observation alone.
It must first be detected, recorded, classified, routed to the appropriate body and assessed against an evidentiary or regulatory threshold. Monitoring design therefore influences what becomes visible within governance systems and what remains outside formal recognition.
The governance papers examine these structures independently of the site-specific reports. They consider detectability, monitoring cadence, threshold systems, cross-domain information sharing, evidentiary burden and the mechanisms through which new observations may — or may not — lead to reassessment.
The archive is compiled by Daniel Nye, who publishes the technical reports as D. Nye.
Daniel began documenting Preston New Road during its development and operation. What began as a local photographic record gradually developed into a much larger geotagged archive capable of supporting repeat comparison across locations and years.
The work is undertaken independently as citizen research. It is intended to support professional, regulatory and public examination, not to replace formal site investigation, laboratory analysis, engineering survey or statutory assessment.
Reports are published with clear dates, versions and status descriptions. Working papers are identified as such, and archived copies are retained so that the development of the evidence and interpretation can be followed over time.
Where corrections, additional data or stronger explanations become available, later versions may supersede earlier ones without removing the historical record.
The aim is straightforward: to preserve what has been observed, make the reasoning inspectable and leave an evidence trail that others can test.
Unless otherwise stated, original report text, website text and analytical graphics are © D. Nye and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.
Original photographs and video are © D. Nye. Unmodified non-commercial sharing is permitted with attribution to D. Nye / Ground Truth & Governance and a link to the original source page. Permission is required to distribute cropped, annotated, colour-altered or otherwise modified versions.
Third-party documents, maps, basemaps and underlying datasets remain subject to their respective copyright, licensing and attribution requirements.
Presented by
NED Archive — National Evidence & Documentation
An independent public-interest archive of environmental evidence, records and analysis.