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 |
| Main basemap | OpenStreetMap contributors, tiles by CARTO (Voyager). Where no CARTO key is configured, Esri World Terrain (Esri, USGS, NOAA) is used instead. | ODbL / CARTO terms · Esri 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.
- Wildlife and activity suggestions. Roughly fifty places have a hand-written
wildlife line. The rest fall back to a description chosen from the biome and the coarse
biogeographic realm the coordinates fall in, because fauna differs sharply by continent — a
single line per biome ends up promising crocodilians in the North Sea or ibex in the Andes.
These are typical species for the habitat, not a guarantee of what you will see.
- 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.