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 courses and water geometries as well as all base-map data (coastlines, places, boundaries, land use).
Wikidata · CC0
River lengths, mean discharges, drainage basins and multilingual names.
Wikipedia & Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA and others
Short descriptions and photos on the river pages; licences are stated per article and image.
Natural Earth · Public Domain
Shaded relief with hypsometric tints, ocean depth layers and the country outlines used for highlighting.
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).