About the Atlas

The Global Ecosystems Atlas is an open-data resource mapping the extent, change, condition and risk of nature over time. It brings the world's ecosystem maps into a single, comparable view.

A shared language for ecosystems

Ecosystem data has long been fragmented across formats, methods and institutions, which makes comparison between countries difficult. Rather than asking every country to adopt one national mapping method, the Atlas aligns the maps that already exist to a shared typology.

That typology is the IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology, which describes 110 Ecosystem Functional Groups across the terrestrial, freshwater, marine and subterranean realms. A functional group is defined by how an ecosystem works rather than by the species it contains, which is what makes ecosystems from different mapping programmes comparable at all.

Open by default

Every dataset on the Atlas is freely accessible. Data can be downloaded as CSV, GeoJSON or Cloud-Optimised GeoTIFF, or queried programmatically through the public API. Each contributing dataset keeps its own citation and licence, so provenance travels with the data.

Who builds it

The Atlas is convened by the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) and hosted by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), working with a technical consortium and partner organisations.

Contributing data

Coverage grows as national and regional datasets are contributed and reviewed. National mapping programmes are usually built with field validation and local knowledge, and they resolve ecosystems that global products tend to miss.

If your organisation holds ecosystem maps that could be aligned to the typology, we would like to hear from you at secretariat@geosec.org.