The progress bars just give you 'lures' for random monsters in that category. The "turf war evidence" just gives you a random boost on one of the bars.
If you don't use a lure then the monsters spawn randomly from a pool of all the monster probabilities from your various guiding lands levels. The monster pools can be found here:
https://monsterhunterworld.wiki.fextralife.com/Guiding+Lands
Your main goals in the GL are:
- Raise forest to level 4 to unlock 2 monsters. Do this primarily by hunting monsters in the forest, but I think anything that gives research points (e.g. monster tracks) will raise the level of that area a bit. Trapping is a good way to get big region level boosts. Hunting in one area will decrease the level of the others, but the net level gain is always positive (until you hit the max total region cap, when there will be zero net gain, but don't worry about that yet). Hunting in someone else's GL via an SOS will raise YOUR GL levels, not theirs.
- Gather from the mining/bonepiles. These don't appear on the map, but appear randomly (from a limited pool of potential locations). The mining/bonepile levels are independent of the region level, so gather whenever you spot one. The materials are used for high level weapon/charm upgrades, armours and weapon augments. You also get a lot of coal for the steamworks.
- Do the special assignments to unlock the volcano and tundra regions as soon as they appear (added in patches so I don't know the PC release dates). You don't need to do anything special to make these quests appear.
- HUNT ALL THE THINGS. Each monster has unique drops in the GL that are used for high level weapon/charm upgrades, armours and weapon augments. You can meld the different items, but you need to find it before it appears at the melder. The best option is to SOS into other people's guiding lands for monsters that aren't available in your own. You don't need to slay the monster, only hurt it enough to make the materials drop. Try not to be a dick when SOS-ing and help fight the team's monster instead of running off to hunt your own thing.
- Work towards a set of guiding lands levels/monsters that you like. You can't max out every zone, since you have a max level cap of 27 (once volcano and tundra are unlocked and you are MR >100), meaning you can have 3 zones at level 7, one at level 4 and two at level 1 (to acheive your the perfect end-game distribution will take a LOT of work, and is not necessary since you can always use an SOS). Most people try to get coral region level 7 so that it can spawn tempered namielle, since her drops are used for weapon health augments (generally the most desirable). Note that you can talk to the handler to lock your region levels while hunting in areas that you don't want to level up, and can ask her to de-level zones that you don't need anymore.
I'm doing points 4 and 5 at the moment. I'm not sure I'll ever get the perfect level distribution since I don't really care enough to grind specific zones/monsters, but I'm going to get two zones to level 7 to get a decent selection of tempered monsters and leave the other levels as whatever.
I generally look at the monsters in my GL and if I don't like them I use an SOS into some else's GL. Then I look at what they are hunting and decide whether to lock my regions at the handler (i.e are we hunting in a zone that I want to level up or not). Melding means that every monster's parts are potentially useful so I won't leave the SOS until we've at least finished the current hunt. If the next hunt is for a monster/region I don't want, then I'll leave and repeat this cycle.
Oh, and slot in geologist level 1. It doubles GL monster drops. It's probably a bug, but I'm hoping they leave it in. It would be very unfair to PC players if they patched it now after we've been abusing it for months!
