Data sources & credits

This atlas only exists because many people and projects share their data, infrastructure and software freely. Listed here are all sources with their licences — and our thanks to everyone behind them.

Data

OpenStreetMap · ODbL — © OpenStreetMap contributors
The atlas’ river and canal courses as well as all base-map data (coastlines, places, boundaries, land use).
Wikidata · CC0
River lengths, discharges and drainage basins, lake depths and inflows, mountain peaks and their elevations, population, area, GDP, capitals, currencies and official languages of countries — and the multilingual names.
Wikipedia & Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA and others
Short descriptions and photos on the pages of rivers, lakes, mountain ranges and countries; licences are stated per article and image.
Natural Earth · Public Domain
Country shapes of the political map, urban areas, shaded relief with hypsometric tints and ocean depth layers.
GMBA Mountain Inventory v2 · CC BY 4.0 — Snethlage et al. (2022), GMBA-EarthEnv
Outlines, hierarchy and areas of the mountain ranges — from mountain systems down to subranges.
HydroLAKES v1.0 · CC BY 4.0 — Messager et al. (2016), Nature Communications
Outlines, areas, volumes and mean depths of the lakes and reservoirs.
Terrain Tiles (AWS Open Data) · various open sources
Elevation data for the terrain shading at medium zoom levels — compiled from SRTM (NASA/USGS), GMTED2010 (USGS) and ETOPO1 (NOAA) among others, originally prepared by Mapzen, hosted by Amazon Web Services.

Map infrastructure

OpenFreeMap
Serves the base map’s vector tiles free of charge and without registration — special thanks to this project for making free map hosting available to everyone.
OpenMapTiles · © OpenMapTiles
The tile schema the base map is built on.

Open-source software

MapLibre GL JS · BSD-3
Renders the interactive globe in the browser.
PMTiles / Protomaps · BSD-3
The archive format that lets river, relief and bathymetry tiles be served as single files from our own server.
tippecanoe · BSD-2
Builds the atlas’ vector tiles from the processed geodata.
Noto Sans · SIL OFL 1.1
The map typeface — with glyphs for nearly every script in the world.
Nuxt & Vue · MIT
The framework behind the website and the atlas interface.
Plausible Analytics · AGPL
Cookie-free, privacy-friendly visitor statistics — without any personal profiling.

The attribution notices on the map itself remain in place. If a source is missing or an entry is wrong, we appreciate a note (contact details in the imprint).