Methodology

How every fact on this site is compiled, labeled, gated and refreshed.

Entity model

The atlas is a relational database, not a blog. Regions contain countries, countries contain destinations, destinations contain dive sites; species carry sightings records tying them to destinations and months; wrecks tie to sites and countries; parks, chambers, operators, liveaboards, courses, gear and guides hang off the same spine. Pages are rendered views of that database, which is why they cross-reference each other consistently.

Sourcing

Structured facts are compiled from official and public sources — park and government authorities, the IUCN Red List, DAN and diving-medicine bodies, certification agencies, heritage and hydrographic registers, government tourism boards — plus editorial research. Source citations are stored per entity and rendered at the foot of the pages they support. Ordinary travel blogs are never treated as authoritative for safety-critical fields.

Confidence labels

Every entity carries one of four labels. Well documented: famous, widely published facts. Documented: solid but less prominent. Editorial estimate: a reasonable synthesis, always expressed as ranges. Not yet verified: existence is certain, details are thin — shown honestly rather than papered over. Numeric fields are ranges by design; a single-figure depth appears only where a site is famously surveyed.

The quality gate

Every page receives an internal 0–100 score from completeness, unique prose, sourcing, imagery, seasonality data, interlinking and duplicate-content checks. Pages below the publishing threshold do not ship; pages between thresholds are excluded from the sitemap and marked noindex until improved. The gate exists so growth never becomes thin programmatic filler: a page exists because it answers a real question, not because a database could emit it.

Seasonality data

Month-by-month tables (water, visibility, a 1–5 quality rating, and a note) are compiled only where seasons are genuinely documented — monsoon patterns, published water-temperature climatology, well-established wildlife calendars. Months we could not verify are left empty on purpose, and each destination's month block carries its own confidence label.

AI assistance and imagery

Portions of the compilation are produced with AI-assisted research and then held to the rules above; figures are indicative and should be verified against primary sources. The in-house "data briefs" are AI-written from the atlas's own data and always labeled. All photographic-style imagery is AI-generated illustration created for this site and labeled as such — chosen deliberately instead of scraping photographers' work.

Refresh cadence

News feeds refresh every few hours; video channel feeds and data briefs daily; the quality gate and sitemap recompute weekly; reference entities are re-verified opportunistically, with a last-verified trail in the source records. Corrections land as they are confirmed — the fastest path is the contact page.