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.

GBIF (the Global Biodiversity Information Facility) for species recorded near dive sites: we query its occurrence API for observation records of our catalogue species within about 5 km of each site's charted position, from 1990 onwards, excluding museum specimens and records with a stated position uncertainty above 10 km. Each such listing shows its record count and is labeled as a GBIF record, separately from species our editors charted.

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

Photography comes from Wikimedia Commons under the free licence each photographer chose (CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC0 or public domain), with the author, licence and source file recorded per image and rendered on the photo-credits page. Nothing is scraped: an image is used only when its own file page states a licence we can honour. A smaller set of decorative photographs is licensed from Adobe Stock and credited per image with its asset number. Where no suitable photograph exists yet, an AI-generated illustration produced for this site stands in, stored with its generation record and labeled on the page. Photo credits →

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.