🌍 About Biome Atlas

What this is, where the data comes from, and what is approximate.

What it is

Biome Atlas is an illustrated map of the world's biomes: several hundred natural places you can explore, track and collect, plus Earth Systems — short visual explanations of why a place is the way it is, and where the same pattern repeats around the planet.

On accuracy: this is an educational atlas, not a GIS product. Geographic layers come from published scientific datasets, but they are simplified for legibility and for fast drawing in a browser. They are meant to show a pattern faithfully — not to be used as survey-grade boundaries. Figures quoted in the explanations are rounded.

Data sources

Layer	Source	Licence
Ecoregions & biomes (the “Ecoregions” layer; Mediterranean and boreal extents in Earth Systems)	RESOLVE Ecoregions 2017 — Dinerstein et al., “An Ecoregion-Based Approach to Protecting Half the Terrestrial Realm”, BioScience 67(6), 2017	CC BY 4.0
Climate classification (the “Climate zones” layer and the class shown on every place card)	Köppen-Geiger maps, Beck et al. 2023 — “High-resolution (1 km) Köppen-Geiger maps for 1901–2099 based on constrained CMIP6 projections”, Scientific Data 10, 724. 1991–2020 baseline, 0.1° raster. gloh2o.org/koppen	CC BY 4.0
Deserts, basins, mountain ranges, wetlands, coral reefs, coastlines	Natural Earth	Public domain
Relief basemap (Earth Systems mode)	Esri World Physical Map	Esri terms
Street/terrain basemap	OpenStreetMap contributors, tiles by CARTO	ODbL / CARTO terms
Place photographs & galleries	Wikipedia / Wikimedia Commons	Per-image (mostly CC)
Soundscapes	Freesound field recordings, plus a few public-domain Wikimedia recordings	CC0 / CC BY
Mapping library	Leaflet	BSD-2

How the Earth Systems layers were made

Ecoregions layer. All 847 RESOLVE ecoregions, grouped into their 14 biomes, geometry simplified for web display. Tap any region to see its ecoregion name and biome.
Mediterranean & boreal extents. Taken directly from the RESOLVE biomes Mediterranean Forests, Woodlands & Scrub and Boreal Forests/Taiga.
Deserts, basins, ranges, wetlands, reefs. Natural Earth physical-region and reef geometry; reef lines are buffered slightly so they remain visible at world scale — their position and extent are unchanged.
Climate zones. The Köppen-Geiger raster is drawn as a semi-transparent overlay and is also the lookup source — tapping the map samples a single pixel to name the class. Each place card shows the class measured at its coordinates. At 0.1° resolution a single cell can average across a coastline or a mountain slope, so a rugged site may report its surroundings rather than its microclimate.
Winds, currents and air-circulation arrows. These are schematic. They are drawn to communicate a mechanism clearly, not to trace exact streamlines.
Cross-section illustrations (Kilimanjaro's climate belts, the reef light zones, rain shadow, the Hadley cell) are diagrams, not maps — they are not to scale.

Inspiration

The design of the explanatory mode owes a lot to Ecoregions 2017, the Allen Coral Atlas, One Earth's Bioregion Navigator, koppenmap.com and NOAA's Science On a Sphere — all of which show that scientific data can be beautiful and legible at the same time.

Corrections

If you spot something wrong — a boundary, a figure, a claim that overreaches — it is a bug and worth reporting. The explanations aim to be honest first and impressive second.