Inventory

A group of EPFL and ETH Zurich scientists have mapped the biodiversity in forests worldwide. Their data, when combined with climate projections, reveal trends that could support ecosystem conservation and restoration efforts. According to the latest figures from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, forests cover just over 4 billion hectares of ...

The Overture Maps Foundation today launched the first beta of its global open map dataset. With this, the foundation, which is backed by the likes of Amazon, Esri, Meta, Microsoft and TomTom, is getting one step closer to launching a production-ready open dataset for developers who need geospatial data to power their applications. “This Beta ...

Researchers at the Australian National University (ANU) have created a global atlas for potential pumped hydro storage sites located in former mining areas. “Mining sites can be shaped during the end stages of mining to form a pumped hydro reservoir,” the scientists explained, noting that mining sites are often located close to the power network ...

A group of researchers led by China’s Nanjing University has created a global-scale inventory map to determine the spatio-temporal distribution of floating photovoltaics. “Existing statistical reports on water-surface photovoltaics (WSPV) only provide aggregated summary statistics but lack spatiotemporal information, which hinders the environmental assessment and policy management,” the research’s lead author, Shanchuan Guo, told pv ...

ProtectedSeas Navigator—the first global map of the world’s marine life regulations and their boundaries is now available. Navigator is a free, interactive map of over 21,000 marine protected and managed areas across 220 countries and territories and in over 25 languages. Navigator offers a global view of marine life protections to help inform progress towards ...

From Portland Stone to Millstone Grit, Historic England is launching a new online database of the stones that define the rich diversity of our country’s buildings. Historic England is unveiling the first Building Stones Database for England, which brings together information on over 4,000 types of building stones, their uses and sources, in a searchable ...

The Composite Gazetteer of Australia is a cloud-based system allowing users to easily discover, interrogate and download place names information from Australia and its external territories. It is developed as a partnership between contributing agencies of the Intergovernmental Committee on Surveying and Mapping (ICSM) and is built on modern infrastructure providing automated ingestion and validation, ...

TGN is a thesaurus. TGN is not a geographic information system (GIS), although it may be linked to existing major, general-purpose, geographic databases and maps. While most records in TGN include coordinates, these coordinates are approximate and are intended for reference (“finding purposes”) only (as is true of coordinates in most atlases and other resources, ...

The GeoNames geographical database is available for download free of charge under a creative commons attribution license. It contains over 27 million geographical names and consists of over 12 million unique features whereof 4.8 million populated places and 15 million alternate names. All features are categorized into one out of nine feature classes and further ...

Australia’s frogs deserve better distribution maps, and thanks to tens of thousands of people across Australia recording calling frogs with their phones, we now have the occurrence data to do this. Since the launch of the Australian Museum’s FrogID project in 2017, there has been a rapid increase in frog occurrence records in Australia. FrogID ...