Resolve place
EDOP (Environmental Dimensions of Place) is an experimental exploration of how physical environments can be described, compared, and related across the world. At its core, the system assigns an environmental signature to any geographic location, based on the characteristics of the hydrological sub-basin in which it lies. These sub-basins—drawn from the HydroBasins and HydroAtlas datasets at level 8—partition the Earth's land surface into roughly 190,000 regions, providing a consistent, global unit for environmental comparison.
Using this framework, EDOP lets you look up places by name or coordinates and examine how their environmental profiles relate to one another. In some cases, those comparisons are purely environmental; in others, they are paired with text-based similarity measures derived from descriptive sources such as Wikipedia, currently demonstrated for selected World Heritage cities and sites. The system has begun incoporating OneEarth ecoregions as navigable environmental hierarchies. This early release is best understood as a foundation: a way to expose environmental data as reusable, comparable signatures, and a first step toward more integrated views of place, environment, and cultural description.Basin Environmental Types
20 clusters of 190k sub-basins based on environmental bands A-D. Select to see WH cities in basins of that type.
20 World Heritage sites
258 World Heritage Cities
members of Organization of World Heritage Cities (OWHC)
Ecoregions Hierarchy
Data from OneEarth Bioregions (847 ecoregions in 185 bioregions, 53 subrealms, 14 realms)
D-PLACE Societies
1,291 ethnographically documented societies from D-PLACE
D-PLACE (Database of Places, Language, Culture, and Environment) provides coded observations for 94 anthropological variables across subsistence strategies, settlement patterns, kinship systems, and social organization. Focal years are typically 1850–1940, representing the "ethnographic present." Of these societies, 87% have been spatially joined to EDOP's environmental signatures, enabling exploration of environment-culture relationships. 158 (13%) lack basin assignments (islands, coastal locations). Initial marker colors differentiate OneEarth Bioregions.