Pointwise surjective presentations of stacks

Abstract

We show that any stack $\mathfrak{X}$ of finite type over a Noetherian scheme has a presentation $X \rightarrow \mathfrak{X}$ by a scheme of finite type such that $X(F) \rightarrow \mathfrak{X}(F)$ is onto, for every finite or real closed field $F$. Under some additional conditions on $\mathfrak{X}$, we show the same for all perfect fields. We prove similar results for (some) Henselian rings. We give two applications of the main result. One is to counting isomorphism classes of stacks over the rings $\mathbb{Z}/p^n$; the other is about the relation between real algebraic and Nash stacks.