Visual Data Planet — Earth mapped in 3D

Live: vdata.liako.eu/planet

Earth on one interactive 3D globe with real shaded terrain, overlaying open Earth datasets — protected areas and conservation, life, geography and the oceans. The core is the World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA, UNEP-WCMC & IUCN, protectedplanet.net) — 31,362 sites, a uniform sample of the ~315,000-site database:

• Every dot is a real national park, strict reserve, natural monument, habitat area, protected landscape or marine sanctuary, at its true latitude/longitude — greens on land and coast, blues at sea
• Layers by IUCN management category (Ia·Ib → VI), plus the international designations: UNESCO World Heritage, Ramsar wetlands, UNESCO-MAB biospheres
• The second Protected Planet database, WD-OECM (7,524 Other Effective area-based Conservation Measures) as its own orange layer
• 3D terrain and sea floor — the globe carries real shaded relief (ETOPO elevation displacement) for both land and ocean: mountain ranges rise, and the sea floor drops away into depth-shaded basins with mid-ocean ridges, seamount chains and trenches (NASA Blue Marble bathymetry surface, so the oceans read by depth rather than flat blue)
• Sharp at any zoom — a tangent-space normal map (from ETOPO) shades every ridge and valley per-pixel, and the surface texture is served at the resolution the GPU allows (up to a 16k NASA Blue Marble on desktops), so zooming into land or the sea floor stays crisp
• Mycorrhizal-fungi biodiversity hotspots (15,496) from SPUN's Underground Atlas — arbuscular (AM) and ectomycorrhizal (EcM) richness hotspots; over 90% lie outside protected areas
• Maritime cartography — bathymetric depth contours (isobaths at 200 / 2,000 / 4,000 / 6,000 m) and international maritime boundary lines (Natural Earth)
• Tap any dot for its data: name, designation, IUCN category, reported area, year established, country
• Search any park or reserve by name (Enter cycles matches); the camera flies to it
• Context in the HUD: 17.6% of land and 8.4% of the ocean are protected (Protected Planet)
• Earth layers for geographic context — 7,342 cities (Natural Earth, coloured by population), 7,461 mountain peaks ≥ 3,500 m (Wikidata, brighter = higher), 1,081 ports and 295 named oceans & seas (Natural Earth label points) — each tappable with its own panel, searchable, and toggleable in the legend

Additional open-data layers (all off by default — tick them on in the legend):

• Political — country borders and capitals (Natural Earth)
• Logistics — 5,276 large & medium airports (OurAirports)
• Disasters — live M4.5+ earthquakes of the past 30 days (USGS) and open natural events — wildfires, storms, volcanoes, floods (NASA EONET)
• Climate — Köppen-Geiger climate zones (Beck et al. 2018)
• Population — populated places weighted by inhabitants (Natural Earth)
• Public APIs — 565 free public APIs from public-apis, placed at the geographic location of the server that hosts each one, coloured by category (13 sections)

The mapping methodology — coordinate maths, sampling, centroid handling, and what is exact versus approximate — is documented in METHODS.md; sources and citation in DATA.md.

Running locally

No build step — plain JavaScript, Three.js and 3d-force-graph from CDN (pinned to matching revisions — a mismatch makes textures sample black).

The WDPA-derived data file is not shipped in this repository (WDPA terms prohibit redistribution). Generate it once, then serve:

node scripts/fetch-wdpa.mjs includes/js/planet-data.js
python3 -m http.server 8000   # → http://localhost:8000/

The earth layers file (includes/js/planet-earth.js — cities/peaks/ports/seas, public domain + CC0) is shipped; rebuild it any time with node scripts/fetch-earth-layers.mjs.

Licence

Code is MIT. Not covered: the WDPA data (property of UNEP-WCMC & IUCN, regenerate locally via the script above), Earth imagery (Solar System Scope, CC BY 4.0), and the LIAKO name and branding.

Sister projects: visual-data-cosmos · visual-data-solar · visual-data-art — compiled by Liako.