Data
Sources of data a model of a place can be fed with.
The first layer of the stack: what was measured or recorded about a place, and on what terms it can be had. Each entry says what a source covers, at what resolution and cadence, how to get it and what it costs. What a model makes of the data is the next layer, Ontologies; how the layers fit is in The parts of a digital twin.
Public knowledge base from Andrea Farias and the worker cooperative Motiu, with r3.0, that maps organizations doing bioregional and regenerative work around the world, with a shared vocabulary of themes and tags and a bibliography of sources.
Living systemsCities & places open participation
Web map from WWF and partners of whale migration routes built from pooled satellite telemetry, with threat and protection layers alongside; free to browse at bluecorridors.org.
Living systems partly open datapartly open participation
Global 10 km map of observed and projected change in attainable crop yields under climate change, from a team at IAE-CSIC and the Barcelona School of Economics, expressed as the number of people each grid cell could feed.
Climate Change Institute, University of Maine. Daily charts and day-of-year data for global and regional sea surface temperature, 2 m air temperature and sea ice extent, drawn from NOAA OISST and ECMWF ERA5.
Weather & climateWater open data
Satellite observations and Earth-observation processing.
Densely annotated underwater image datasets of Red Sea coral reefs from EPFL and partners for training segmentation models; V2 adds panoptic labels, 95 classes and fish instances, and is the training data behind DeepReefMap.
Living systemsSensory landscape open data
Map and dataset from Cornell researchers of about 1.8 million individual tree crowns in New York City classified to genus from PlanetScope satellite imagery and airborne lidar, including trees on private land and in natural areas; published August 2026.
Living systemsWeather & climate open sourceopen data
Lidar-derived model from CTrees of forest fire fuels as one-metre voxels carrying canopy, ladder and ground fuel properties, demonstrated at three US sites and published as open 3D arrays for fire models to read.
FireLiving systems open data
Benchmark from Google Research of open-ended GIS analysis problems written and cross-checked by geospatial experts, used to test how well an AI agent plans an expert-level spatial analysis.
Cities & places open sourcepartly open data
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Benchmark from Google Research of generated geospatial queries with known answers that require chaining one to four kinds of geospatial tool; used to test an AI agent's multi-step tool use and exact spatial computation.
Cities & places open sourcepartly open data
Online platform from the World Resources Institute, until 2026 called Global Forest Watch, that publishes free global data, maps and alerts on forests and is widening its coverage to grasslands, farmland and trees outside forests.
Living systems open data
Global map from One Earth and Nature Data Lab of lands and inland waters important for biodiversity, ecosystem services and climate, with land cover and conservation status, designed to be updated every year; launched September 2026 as a free web viewer.
Living systemsCities & places partly open data
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Esri feature service in ArcGIS Living Atlas that serves iNaturalist's research-grade observations worldwide, refreshed monthly, with hexagon summaries at small scales.
Living systemsCities & places partly open dataAPI
Community platform where people photograph plants, animals and fungi and others identify them; the observations are published as open biodiversity data for research and conservation.
Living systemsPeople & society open dataopen participation
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NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory's record of atmospheric carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa Observatory since 1974, as daily, weekly, monthly and annual means, with a global mean series.
Weather & climate open data
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National Snow and Ice Data Center's running record of Arctic and Antarctic sea ice extent and concentration, daily and monthly, from November 1978 to the present. Version 4.
Weather & climateWater open data
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Global storm-resolving atmosphere simulation output from the DOE E3SM project's SCREAM model, repackaged by NVIDIA as Zarr on Hugging Face for training and testing machine-learning weather and climate emulators.
Weather & climate open data
Volunteer-built open map database of the world, covering roads, buildings, land use and places; the base layer most digital twins of places start from.
Cities & placesMovement & logistics open dataopen participation
Web map of orca and other whale sightings in the Salish Sea, placed on the map from the narrative reports in Orca Network newsletters.
Living systems open dataAPI
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UNEP-WCMC's record of the world's protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures, the World Database on Protected Areas, updated monthly from government and other submissions and downloadable from the site.
Living systemsCities & places open datapartly open participation
Website from the Institute for Progress that charts US energy production, consumption, prices and grid reliability, nationally and for every state, from open government data such as the EIA.
Energy open data
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Wikimedia Enterprise's open Parquet dataset joining about 17 million OpenStreetMap features to Wikidata items, Wikipedia and Wikivoyage articles, built by Michal Migurski.
Cities & places open data