Open data · v1.0.0

Spot–Climate–Species–Routes Dataset

An integrated open dataset joining 2,928 dive, kite, surf and freedive spots to daily climate aggregates, OBIS + GBIF marine species observations, and the OpenFlights direct-route airline graph.

DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20668393 Concept DOI (latest): 10.5281/zenodo.20668392 Zenodo record ↗ CC-BY 4.0

Why we published this

The four upstream layers — site polygons, climate aggregates, marine observations, airline routes — are each individually open. The join is not. To answer a question like "which dive sites are reachable on a direct flight from Lisbon, in months when the water is ≥21 °C, and have manta-ray observations in the last five years?" a researcher would otherwise need to re-implement spot polygons, run their own 5 km-radius queries against OBIS and GBIF, dedupe OpenFlights, and re-derive monthly SST means. We publish the join itself so that work doesn't have to be repeated, and so downstream studies and journalism can cite the same source.

Files

Direct downloads from Zenodo. All files are UTF-8 CSV with header rows. Coordinates WGS 84 (EPSG:4326). Dates ISO 8601.

File	Rows	Size	Description
countries.csv	64	3 KB	ISO-3166 country codes, slug, English name, centroid lat/lon.
spots.csv	2,928	424 KB	One row per published spot. Activity, coords, water-temp range, depth, difficulty, MPA flag, best months.
airports.csv	4,563	362 KB	IATA reference (name, city, country, lat/lon).
airport_routes.csv	34,876	750 KB	Direct non-stop airline route pairs (OpenFlights, CC-BY 3.0).
daily_climate.csv	749,568	50 MB	Per-spot, per-day-of-year wind / air-temp / precip percentiles (Open-Meteo + ERA5).
monthly_climate.csv	24,576	800 KB	Same data aggregated by month.
species_observations.csv	112,548	24 MB	OBIS + GBIF marine occurrences within 5km of each spot, terrestrial-noise filtered.
species_by_spot.csv	63,163	4.9 MB	Aggregation: one row per (spot × species) with observation count, first / last year.

Total uncompressed: 81 MB. Or download everything as one bundle from Zenodo .

How to cite

If you use this dataset in research, journalism, or a product, please cite all of the following. The CC-BY 4.0 licence requires it.

Primary attribution

Nitrovic, A. (2026). OpenWaterAtlas Spot–Climate–Species–Routes Dataset (v1.0.0) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20668393

BibTeX

@dataset{nitrovic_2026_owa_dataset,
  author    = {Nitrovic, Alex},
  title     = {OpenWaterAtlas Spot--Climate--Species--Routes Dataset},
  version   = {1.0.0},
  year      = {2026},
  month     = jun,
  publisher = {Zenodo},
  doi       = {10.5281/zenodo.20668393},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20668393}
}

Upstream sources you must also cite

OBIS — marine species occurrences · CC-BY 4.0
GBIF — marine species occurrences · CC0 / CC-BY (per record)
OpenFlights — global airline routes · CC-BY 3.0
NOAA Coral Reef Watch — sea-surface temperature + bleaching · Public domain (NOAA)
Open-Meteo — historical wind / air-temp / precipitation · CC-BY 4.0
Copernicus Marine Service — ocean reanalysis · Free use w/ attribution
OpenStreetMap — spot locations imported from OSM · ODbL 1.0

Found a problem?

If a coordinate is wrong, a species record is misclassified, or a route has gone seasonal/suspended — tell us. Every correction goes into the next version (v1.1 is planned for ~Q4 2026 with refreshed OBIS + GBIF + OpenFlights pulls).

Send a correction

Versioning

Each version of this dataset gets its own Zenodo record with its own versioned DOI. The concept DOI (10.5281/zenodo.20668392) always points to the latest version — use that one in long-running citations where "latest" is the intent. Use the versioned DOI when reproducibility matters.