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Earth Water and Sky emblemEarth Water and Sky

About

A window into recorded journeys

Earth Water and Sky exists so that anyone can look at a place on the planet and ask, honestly, which tagged animals have been recorded there and what their records show.

Purpose

Wildlife tracking produces extraordinary records, but they are scattered across projects, formats and portals, and they are easy to misread. We bring permitted records together on a single globe, keep their provenance visible, and pair them with Tamara, a guide who explains what the evidence supports and refuses to go further. The application is a reader of other people's science, and it says so on every page.

Principles

  • Permission first. Sources are read only where their terms allow and each project's publication policy is applied before anything is shown.
  • Observation time, honestly. Nothing is presented as a live position. Observed time and release time are always distinct.
  • Evidence hierarchy. Provider records outrank derived figures, which outrank interpretation; each is labelled.
  • Corrections are public. When a source revises or withdraws records, the change is recorded and the notes that relied on them are superseded.
  • Demonstration is labelled. Synthetic data used to show features is never mixed with real observations.

Operator

This deployment runs in public context and is in connected data mode. The operator is responsible for the provider agreements in the source register and for the policies published under Privacy and Terms.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the researchers, tagging programmes and data networks whose work makes any of this visible: the IOOS Animal Telemetry Network, the Ocean Tracking Network, Movebank, OBIS, GBIF and IMOS among them. Attribution for each dataset appears with the records it covers. The globe is rendered with CesiumJS. Surface imagery is Esri World Imagery (Maxar and Earthstar Geographics), with Sentinel-2 cloudless by EOX as the fallback and Natural Earth II when the network is unavailable. A Cesium ion token, when configured, is used instead. Live weather uses NOAA GOES, JMA Himawari and EUMETSAT Meteosat cloud imagery plus NASA GPM IMERG precipitation, acknowledged via NASA GIBS and EUMETSAT.

Open questions and limits

Coverage is uneven: many providers do not permit redistribution, some share only completed studies, and some species are deliberately hidden. The source register states exactly what is connected, what is archival and what is unavailable. The current build status is published at /docs/implementation-status.