The gap between private landowners and the hunting public is shrinking in North Dakota thanks to a new app called HuntLink. North Dakota Game and Fish launched the pilot program through its website in late 2025, and the agency is hoping to expand it this year. The free app helps licensed hunters connect with landowners who are seeking to reduce certain game populations on their land.
“We’ve been losing that face-to-face interaction between landowners and sportsmen,” says Levi Jacobson, assistant wildlife division chief for the North Dakota Game and Fish Department. “So, we did a soft release in fall 2025 to make sure everything works the way we want it to. We will push it harder now.”
As an example, a rancher who is having a problem with coyotes preying on their livestock could add their property to the app, which is built around a digital map. A coyote hunter could then find that property, along with the landowner’s contact information, by looking at the same map. HuntLink’s layer feature allows hunters to search for opportunities by species, and landowners can instantly toggle their properties on and off depending on their needs. This creates a win-win scenario where a hunter could make a call one day and potentially harvest coyotes on that property the next.
The new app is separate from North Dakota’s PLOTS program, which pays willing landowners to allow public walk-in hunting access during specific hunting seasons. That program started in the 1990s, and hunters can find these properties through NDGF’s Hunting Atlas. A yellow, upside-down triangle sign indicates a PLOTS property, and unlike with HuntLink, hunters don’t have to contact the landowner for permission.
“We have 880,000 acres in that program,” Jacobson tells Outdoor Life. “That’s our bread and butter. Our public lands are not spread well across the state, so a lot of people solely hunt PLOTS.”
North Dakota has other programs for public hunting opportunities on private land, and Jacobson explains that HuntLink is an extension of these programs. The state’s Coyote Catalog, which is co-managed by NDGF and the state’s Department of Agriculture, was created specifically for coyote management, while NDGF’s Antlerless Deer Program helps connect deer hunters with willing hosts. Both programs are labor intensive, though, with the state agencies acting as a go-between.
“We wanted to keep that landowner-sportsmen connection going and foster that relationship,” Jacobson says. “But we wanted to take the middle man out, which was us.”
The Coyote Catalog is currently running in tandem with the new app, but both it and the Antlerless Deer Program will likely be rolled into HuntLink in the future. In addition to coyotes and deer, HuntLink is also creating opportunities for geese and wild turkeys, along with elk and moose.
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Those other opportunities are limited at this point, and coyotes are far and away the most available species to hunt, with around 24 properties currently open. But in a state that is 93 percent privately owned, that’s still a small pool of options.
Going forward, Jacobson says, the challenge is no longer connecting hunters with landowners. It’s keeping landowners involved and providing enough private-land opportunities for the demand that’s already out there.
“North Dakota has a lot of hunters per capita and not a lot of public land. We have not had a problem finding hunters. We need landowners to keep signing their stuff up.”
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