Data Sources

Every class of source this atlas draws on, what it supplies, and how to read the citations.

Official & government

Marine-park and protected-area authorities (rules, zones, seasons, permits), government tourism boards (logistics, entry), heritage and hydrographic registers (wreck protection status), and agencies such as NOAA for ocean and habitat context. These anchor the safety- and rules-critical fields.

Science & conservation

The IUCN Red List for species conservation status; marine-biology and fisheries literature for sizes, ranges and behavior; UNESCO listings where sites carry World Heritage status.

Diving institutions

DAN and regional diving-medicine bodies for safety and emergency conventions; certification agencies (PADI, SSI, NAUI, RAID, CMAS, BSAC, GUE, TDI/SDI) for training structures; official operator and liveaboard websites for factual business information.

News

The News section aggregates real articles from reputable diving and ocean publishers via their public feeds. Each item names its publisher and links to the original; we copy nothing beyond the feed-provided headline and summary. In-house data briefs are separate and labeled.

Videos

The Videos section lists recent uploads from official channels (agencies, safety organizations, ocean-science bodies) via their public feeds, linking to each creator's own channel. Nothing is hosted or re-uploaded here.

Imagery

All photographic-style imagery is AI-generated illustration produced for this site (via the Higgsfield platform), stored with its generation record, and labeled on the page. No photographs are scraped from photographers, operators, or other websites.

How citations appear

Entity pages carry a Sources line listing the publishers behind that entity's structured facts. Absence of a source for a field means the field is editorial synthesis — and its confidence label says so. The free API returns the same data with the same caveats.