# ESS all the way: environmental datasets for the IB ESS individual investigation > A dataset is one file of numbers that you download and open; a portal is a website you search to find datasets. Every one of the 81 datasets below was downloaded and counted by a teacher, with its traps written down; 46 are ready for a research question on the three lines. The page for people: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets ## How to use this list - A research question in this course has three lines: what people do (human), what happens to nature (natural), and somebody's plan (a law, a target or a programme). A dataset supplies columns for one line or both. - "Ready" means this list already holds the partner file, matched on place and years. "No partner in this list yet" means the student must bring the other side. - A dataset has to pass four tests: - It has to be numbers you can change, not a picture of numbers. - You have to be able to say what one row is, in a sentence. - It has to cover your years and your places. Both, not one. - You have to be able to have it on screen in ten minutes. Today, not in two weeks. - Send a student to a dataset's card and its download page. Never invent a link, and never tell a student what the data will show. ## Datasets (81) ### Nutrients and weedkiller in Haute-Savoie's rivers, from Hub'Eau - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#hubeau-physicochimie - Download page: https://hubeau.eaufrance.fr/page/api-qualite-cours-deau - Publisher: Hub'Eau (OFB and BRGM), from Naïades, the national database of the French water agencies. Place: France. Issues: Water pollution, Rivers and lakes, Food and farming. Licence: Licence Ouverte (Etalab). Hub'Eau asks you to credit the author: cite Hub'Eau and the Naïades database, and give the web address you used and the date you downloaded. - One row: One measurement of one substance in one water sample, taken at one station on one date. A station usually has about four samples a year. - Covers: Haute-Savoie. Orthophosphate at 598 stations and nitrate at 612, 1971 to 2026, but never more than 44 stations a year before 2002. Glyphosate and AMPA at 109 stations, 2001 to 2026 - Three lines: ready; pairs with River invertebrates and diatoms in Haute-Savoie, from Hub'Eau - Plans (line 3): Nitrate vulnerable zones on the Lake Geneva shore and round Saint-Julien-en-Genevois; The SDAGE Rhône-Méditerranée 2022 to 2027, France's plan for the EU Water Framework Directive; The SAGE of the Arve, the water plan for the Arve basin; The Loi Labbé: no chemical weedkiller on public land or in private gardens; The Ecophyto plans, to cut the use of pesticides on farms - Traps: A value below the limit is written as the limit; The limit changed; AMPA does not only come from glyphosate; Keep size=20000 in the address; One row per sample, about four samples a year; Look at the highest values before anything else; The units are the whole ion; Open it through the import command; The file grows - Checked: 2026-09-27 ### River invertebrates and diatoms in Haute-Savoie, from Hub'Eau - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#hubeau-hydrobiologie - Download page: https://hubeau.eaufrance.fr/page/api-hydrobiologie - Publisher: Hub'Eau (OFB and BRGM), from Naïades. Every row comes from the hydrobiology bank of the Agence de l'eau Rhône Méditerranée Corse. Place: France. Issues: Biodiversity, Water pollution, Rivers and lakes. Licence: Licence Ouverte (Etalab). Hub'Eau asks you to credit the author: cite Hub'Eau and the Naïades database, and give the web address you used and the date you downloaded. - One row: One index score from one survey at one station on one date. Most stations have one survey in a year, and many are not surveyed every year. - Covers: Haute-Savoie. The invertebrate index I2M2 at 199 stations, 2008 to 2025, and the diatom index IBD at 251 stations, 2005 to 2025 - Three lines: ready; pairs with Nutrients and weedkiller in Haute-Savoie's rivers, from Hub'Eau; Forever chemicals (PFAS) in Haute-Savoie's rivers and the Rhône at Lyon, from Hub'Eau - Questions on the three lines: Do Haute-Savoie's river stations with more AMPA, a breakdown product of glyphosate, have lower invertebrate index (I2M2) scores, 2014 to 2024? | Do the Arve's stations with more nitrate have lower diatom index (IBD) scores, from Chamonix to the Swiss border, 2008 to 2024? - Plans (line 3): The SDAGE Rhône-Méditerranée 2022 to 2027, France's plan for the EU Water Framework Directive; The SAGE of the Arve, the water plan for the Arve basin; Nitrate vulnerable zones on the Lake Geneva shore and round Saint-Julien-en-Genevois - Traps: Here a higher score is better, for both indices; I2M2 starts in 2008; Almost a third of the surveys were in February or March; 2025 is not complete in the file; Keep size=10000 in the address; Some station-years have two scores, and some are not checked; River names are not unique; Take the year from the first four characters; The index is calculated, not counted - Checked: 2026-09-27 ### Forever chemicals (PFAS) in Haute-Savoie's rivers and the Rhône at Lyon, from Hub'Eau - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#hubeau-pfas - Download page: https://hubeau.eaufrance.fr/page/api-qualite-cours-deau - Publisher: Hub'Eau (OFB and BRGM), from Naïades, the national database of the French water agencies. Place: France. Issues: Water pollution, Rivers and lakes. Licence: Licence Ouverte (Etalab). Hub'Eau asks you to credit the author: cite Hub'Eau and the Naïades database, and give the web address you used and the date you downloaded. - One row: One measurement of one PFAS in one water sample, taken at one station on one date. Most stations are sampled 4 or 12 times a year. - Covers: Haute-Savoie. PFOS at 80 stations and PFOA and PFHxA at 34, 2014 to 2026, with 10 to 41 stations a year. The same address for the Rhône département covers Lyon and the Rhône below it, 2011 to 2026 - Three lines: ready; pairs with River invertebrates and diatoms in Haute-Savoie, from Hub'Eau - Questions on the three lines: Do Haute-Savoie's river stations where PFOS was found have lower invertebrate index (I2M2) scores than stations where it was not, 2022 to 2024? | Are diatom index (IBD) scores lower at Haute-Savoie's river stations where PFOA was found above the limit of quantification, 2018 to 2024? - Plans (line 3): The EU's river standard for PFOS, and the new one for 25 PFAS together; France's PFAS law of 27 February 2025; The State's response to PFAS at Rumilly; The prefectoral orders on the Arkema and Daikin plants at Pierre-Bénite; The EU restriction on PFHxA; The proposed EU ban on almost all PFAS - Traps: A value below the limit is written as the limit; The limit fell, at different times for each PFAS; The river standard is below every limit in the file; Remove exact copies first; PFOS has two codes; The stations change from year to year; One row per sample, 4 or 12 samples a year; Keep size=20000 in the address; Open it through the import command, and match on the code; The Rhône file has traps of its own, and both files grow - Checked: 2026-09-28 ### Forever chemicals (PFAS) in tap water round Lyon and in Haute-Savoie, from Hub'Eau - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#hubeau-eau-potable-pfas - Download page: https://hubeau.eaufrance.fr/page/api-qualite-eau-potable - Publisher: Hub'Eau (OFB and BRGM), from the health ministry's checks on tap water, carried out by the regional health agencies (ARS). Place: France. Issues: Water pollution. Licence: Licence Ouverte (Etalab) version 2.0, the licence of the health ministry's dataset on data.gouv.fr. Cite Hub'Eau and the health ministry, and give the web address you used and the date you downloaded. - One row: One tap-water sample from one supply network in one commune on one date, with the sum of 20 PFAS in µg/l. - Covers: Rhône département: 499 samples from 119 communes, July 2022 to July 2026. Haute-Savoie: 635 samples from 201 communes, August 2022 to June 2026, most of them from 2025 - Three lines: no partner in this list yet; the student brings the other side (fieldwork, or a file they find and check) - Plans (line 3): The EU's drinking-water limit for PFAS, and the French rule that applies it; The prefectoral orders on the Arkema and Daikin plants at Pierre-Bénite; The State's response to PFAS at Rumilly; France's PFAS law of 27 February 2025 - Traps: Below the limit is written 0.0; Some limits of quantification are too high to judge the water; The C and N flags judge the whole sample, not the PFAS; More samples each year, in more places; Some communes have many samples, most have one; A commune is not one water supply; One result is not a number; Look at the highest values first; Open it through the import command - Checked: 2026-09-28 ### Fine particles (PM2.5) day by day at 19 stations across Nouvelle-Aquitaine, including the Gironde fires of July 2026 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#atmo-na-pm25 - Download page: https://opendata.atmo-na.org/dataset/mesures/journaliere/39 - Publisher: Atmo Nouvelle-Aquitaine, the approved air quality monitoring association for the region, through its open data portal. Place: France. Issues: Air quality. Licence: ODbL 1.0 (Open Database License), as the portal's legal notice states. Credit Atmo Nouvelle-Aquitaine, and give the dates you chose and the day you downloaded. - One row: One monitoring station on one day: the day's mean PM2.5 in µg/m³, with a flag saying whether the value was validated. - Covers: 19 stations in the 12 departments of Nouvelle-Aquitaine, 18 of them with values, for the 12 months up to the day you download (28 September 2025 to 27 September 2026 when counted). Three are in Gironde: Talence, Bassens and Bordeaux - Gautier - Three lines: no partner in this list yet; the student brings the other side (fieldwork, or a file they find and check) - Plans (line 3): The EU's air quality directive of 2024 and its daily limit for PM2.5; France's law of 10 July 2023 on the risk of wildfire - Traps: Choose the smoke days from a source, not from the numbers; The form reaches back only 12 months; The day runs on UTC, not French time; Missing days are NULL or blank; Gautier is beside a road; PM2.5 does not only come from smoke; Older years have holes; French in the file - Checked: 2026-09-28 ### E. coli in Geneva's rivers and at the lake shore - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#geneva-ecoli - Download page: https://sitg.ge.ch/donnees/lce-hyb-tm-bact - Publisher: Canton de Genève, published through the SITG catalogue. Place: Geneva. Issues: Water pollution, Rivers and lakes. Licence: SITG open access. The conditions of use are a PDF bundled inside the download; read it and cite the canton as the source. - One row: One monitoring station in one year: the mean E. coli count in CFU/ml, and the number of sampling campaigns that mean was calculated from. - Covers: 184 stations across 78 watercourses plus one lake bathing site, 1995 to 2026 - Three lines: ready; pairs with Benthic invertebrates in Geneva's rivers - Plans (line 3): Contrat de rivières transfrontalier des rivières franco-genevoises Aire-Drize-Laire; The Plan général d'évacuation des eaux, and the Fonds intercommunal d'assainissement that pays for it; The cantonal renaturation fund, and the renaturation of the Aire - Traps: The file has 37,009 rows and 757 observations; 2007 is missing from the dataset entirely; The number of campaigns behind each annual mean ranges from 1 to 12; The current year is present but incomplete, with a single campaign behind it; The station roster grows over time, from 19 stations in 1995 to around 30 now; One value sits at exactly 1000, which looks like the highest value the lab reports (a ceiling), not a real measurement; Zeros and values of 0.8 recur, which suggests a detection limit rather than genuinely no bacteria; The only lake bathing station, Pâquis, reads zero in 24 of its 28 years - Checked: 2026-09-10 ### Nutrients and major ions in Geneva's rivers, 1969 onwards - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#geneva-majeurs - Download page: https://opendata.swiss/en/dataset/qualite-des-eaux-elements-majeurs-toutes-mesures - Publisher: Canton de Genève, published through the SITG catalogue. Place: Geneva. Issues: Water pollution, Rivers and lakes, Food and farming. Licence: SITG open access. Conditions of use are bundled in the download; credit the canton. - One row: One monitoring station in one year: the 90th percentile of that year's samples for about twenty parameters, plus the number of samples behind them. - Covers: 198 stations, 1969 to 2025. The longest series in this family by twenty-six years. - Three lines: ready; pairs with Diatom algae in Geneva's rivers; Benthic invertebrates in Geneva's rivers - Plans (line 3): Contrat de rivières transfrontalier des rivières franco-genevoises Aire-Drize-Laire; The Plan général d'évacuation des eaux, and the Fonds intercommunal d'assainissement that pays for it; The cantonal renaturation fund, and the renaturation of the Aire - Traps: Missing values are recorded as −99, not as blanks, and nothing in the file says so; Silica is −99 in 856 of 950 rows, so that column is 90% missing rather than 90% present; 1973, 1989 and 1990 are absent from the series entirely; The network grew from 6 stations in 1969 to about 30 now, so early and late years describe very different sets of places; Station names are not unique; There are no unit columns here, unlike the physico-chemistry file; Every value is the year's 90th percentile, not its mean - Checked: 2026-09-25 ### Metals in Geneva's rivers - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#geneva-metaux - Download page: https://opendata.swiss/en/dataset/qualite-des-eaux-metaux-toutes-mesures - Publisher: Canton de Genève, published through the SITG catalogue. Place: Geneva. Issues: Water pollution, Rivers and lakes. Licence: SITG open access. Conditions of use are bundled in the download; credit the canton. - One row: One monitoring station in one year: annual values for about thirty metals, plus the number of samples, usually twelve. - Covers: 180 stations, 1995 to 2025 - Three lines: no partner in this list yet; the student brings the other side (fieldwork, or a file they find and check) - Plans (line 3): Contrat de rivières transfrontalier des rivières franco-genevoises Aire-Drize-Laire; The Plan général d'évacuation des eaux, and the Fonds intercommunal d'assainissement that pays for it; The cantonal renaturation fund, and the renaturation of the Aire - Traps: The same −99 convention as the major-elements file, and worse; Gadolinium and vanadium are −99 in about two thirds of rows, so those columns are mostly absent rather than mostly present; Copper is the downgrading parameter in 255 of 683 station-years, which makes it the obvious variable and also the one everybody else in your class will pick; With thirty metal columns, it is tempting to test pair after pair until one comes out significant; Station names are not unique; These are small numbers with real detection limits, so a value of exactly zero is likelier to mean "below the limit" than "none present" - Checked: 2026-09-10 ### Diatom algae in Geneva's rivers - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#geneva-diatomees - Download page: https://sitg.ge.ch/donnees/lce-hyb-tm-dich - Publisher: Canton de Genève, published through the SITG catalogue. Place: Geneva. Issues: Biodiversity, Water pollution, Rivers and lakes. Licence: SITG open access. Conditions of use are bundled in the download; credit the canton. - One row: One monitoring station in one year: a diatom index score, its quality class, and the number of sampling campaigns behind it. - Covers: 180 stations, 1998 to 2025, with no missing years - Three lines: ready; pairs with Nutrients and major ions in Geneva's rivers, 1969 onwards - Questions on the three lines: A comparison of the diatom index between stations upstream and downstream of urban areas. - Plans (line 3): Contrat de rivières transfrontalier des rivières franco-genevoises Aire-Drize-Laire; The Plan général d'évacuation des eaux, and the Fonds intercommunal d'assainissement that pays for it; The cantonal renaturation fund, and the renaturation of the Aire - Traps: The file publishes 24,759 rows and holds 503 observations; Most scores rest on one or two campaigns, not twelve; The index is calculated, not measured: a published formula turns a whole community into one value; Because the scores come already sorted into five bands, it is tempting to analyse the bands; Station names are not unique - Checked: 2026-09-10 ### Benthic invertebrates in Geneva's rivers - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#geneva-macrofaune - Download page: https://sitg.ge.ch/donnees/lce-hyb-tm-ibgn - Publisher: Canton de Genève, published through the SITG catalogue. Place: Geneva. Issues: Biodiversity, Water pollution, Rivers and lakes. Licence: SITG open access. Conditions of use are bundled in the download; credit the canton. - One row: One monitoring station in one year: a mean biological index score, the number of taxa found, and how many samples it rests on. - Covers: 168 stations, 1995 to 2022 - Three lines: ready; pairs with Nutrients and major ions in Geneva's rivers, 1969 onwards; E. coli in Geneva's rivers and at the lake shore - Questions on the three lines: A comparison of invertebrate index scores between renatured reaches and channelised ones. - Plans (line 3): Contrat de rivières transfrontalier des rivières franco-genevoises Aire-Drize-Laire; The Plan général d'évacuation des eaux, and the Fonds intercommunal d'assainissement that pays for it; The cantonal renaturation fund, and the renaturation of the Aire - Traps: The cleanest file in the family: 554 rows and 554 observations, no duplication at all; The series stops in 2022; Scores rest on between 1 and 4 samples, and 46 of them rest on a single sample; The index has a ceiling of 20, so improvement at an already-good station is compressed; Station names are not unique - Checked: 2026-09-10 ### Full physico-chemistry of Geneva's rivers, 1962 to 2017 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#geneva-physicochimie - Download page: https://opendata.swiss/en/dataset/qualite-des-eaux-physico-chimie-toutes-mesures1 - Publisher: Canton de Genève, published through the SITG catalogue. Place: Geneva. Issues: Water pollution, Rivers and lakes. Licence: SITG open access. Conditions of use are bundled in the download; credit the canton. - One row: One monitoring station in one year: annual values for about fifty parameters, most with their own unit column beside them. - Covers: 165 stations, 1962 to 2017 - Three lines: ready (the pair is inside the file) - Questions on the three lines: A comparison of dissolved oxygen before and after a named wastewater treatment plant opened. - Plans (line 3): Contrat de rivières transfrontalier des rivières franco-genevoises Aire-Drize-Laire; The Plan général d'évacuation des eaux, and the Fonds intercommunal d'assainissement that pays for it; The cantonal renaturation fund, and the renaturation of the Aire - Traps: It stops in 2017; Missing values are marked differently here from the rest of the family: small negative numbers such as −0.005 or −0.05, rather than −99; Discharge is present in only 502 of 836 rows, so a question that normalises by flow loses 40% of the data before it starts; About 120 columns, half of them unit columns; Station names are not unique; The overlap with the major-elements file is large but not exact - Checked: 2026-09-10 ### Fish in Geneva's rivers - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#sitg-poissons - Download page: https://ge.ch/sitg/geodata/SITG/OPENDATA/LCE_HYB_TM_POISSONS_R-CSV.zip - Publisher: Canton de Genève, published through the SITG catalogue. Place: Geneva. Issues: Biodiversity, Rivers and lakes, Water pollution. Licence: SITG open access. Conditions of use are bundled in the download; credit the canton. - One row: One station on one survey date: four component scores, a final score and a quality class for the fish community found there. - Covers: 55 stations on 26 watercourses, 2009 to 2025, and only 15 years carry any surveys at all - Three lines: ready (the pair is inside the file) - Questions on the three lines: Do renatured reaches carry higher fish index scores than channelised ones? - Plans (line 3): Contrat de rivières transfrontalier des rivières franco-genevoises Aire-Drize-Laire; The Plan général d'évacuation des eaux, and the Fonds intercommunal d'assainissement that pays for it; The cantonal renaturation fund, and the renaturation of the Aire - Traps: 92 rows is the whole file; The file is not UTF-8; Semicolon-separated, like the rest of this family; CLASSE is ordinal; The four component columns are called PARAMETRE_1 to PARAMETRE_4 and nothing in the file says what they measure; Fifteen distinct years span 2009 to 2025, so the gaps are real - Checked: 2026-09-15 ### Plankton in Lake Geneva, every month from 1974 to 2010 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#ola-leman-plankton - Download page: https://entrepot.recherche.data.gouv.fr/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.15454/AOATKG - Publisher: INRAE Observatory on LAkes (OLA), Thonon-les-Bains, through Recherche Data Gouv. Place: Geneva. Issues: Rivers and lakes, Biodiversity, Water pollution. Licence: Etalab Open Licence 2.0: free to reuse with credit. Cite Anneville, O., Biomass of phytoplankton assemblages in Lake Geneva 1974-2010, Recherche Data Gouv, doi:10.15454/AOATKG, and the date you downloaded it. - One row: One month at the deepest point in the middle of the lake: the average of the one or two samples taken that month. - Covers: Every month from January 1974 to December 2010: 444 months, with phytoplankton missing in 9 and Daphnia in 31 - Three lines: ready (the pair is inside the file) - Questions on the three lines: Is annual mean phytoplankton biomass related to annual mean dissolved phosphate in Lake Geneva, 1974 to 2010? - Plans (line 3): Switzerland's ban on phosphates in laundry detergents; CIPEL's action plans for the lake - Traps: Check the phosphate units; Semicolons and Latin-1; NaN means missing; The sampling depth changed; Months are not independent; Different amounts of water; A1 to A5 are only names here; It stops in 2010 - Checked: 2026-09-25 ### CO2 emissions per person, every country, 1750 onwards - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#owid-co2-per-capita - Download page: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-emissions-per-capita - Publisher: Global Carbon Budget, with major processing by Our World in Data. Place: Global. Issues: Energy and emissions, Climate and weather, People and development. Licence: Our World in Data's processed data is CC BY, and they ask you to credit both them and the underlying provider. So cite the Global Carbon Budget and Our World in Data, not one or the other: the numbers are the source's and the compilation is theirs. - One row: One entity in one year: tonnes of CO2 per person, from fossil fuels and industry. Entity means a country for 214 of them and an aggregate for the other 17. - Covers: 231 entities, 1750 to 2024, of which 214 are countries and 17 are aggregates - Three lines: no partner in this list yet; the student brings the other side (fieldwork, or a file they find and check) - Plans (line 3): The Climate Change Act 2008 and the UK's five-yearly carbon budgets; The EU Emissions Trading System; The Paris Agreement - Traps: The entity column is not a country column; The obvious cleaning rule is worse than the problem; Per-person figures cannot be averaged across countries; It is fossil fuels and industry only: land use change is excluded; The column header is "CO₂ emissions per capita" with a subscript two, which is a different character from the 2 on your keyboard; The series starts in 1750 for five countries and one of them is Taiwan - Checked: 2026-09-15 ### Ozone-depleting substances, country by country, since 1986 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#owid-ozone-depleting-substances - Download page: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ozone-depleting-substance-consumption - Publisher: UN Environment Programme, processed by Our World in Data. Place: Global. Issues: Air quality, Climate and weather, Energy and emissions. Licence: Cite the UN Environment Programme and Our World in Data. Their processing is CC BY; the underlying reporting is UNEP's, under UNEP's terms. - One row: One country in one year: consumption of each chemical family in ODP tonnes, meaning tonnes weighted by ozone-depleting potential rather than tonnes of gas. - Covers: 177 entities, 169 of them countries, 1986 to 2022 - Three lines: no partner in this list yet; the student brings the other side (fieldwork, or a file they find and check) - Plans (line 3): The Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer; The Multilateral Fund; The accelerated HCFC phase-out, and the Kigali Amendment that followed it - Traps: Not one EU member state is in this file as a country; Removing the aggregates takes two rules, not one; Consumption can be negative, and 211 country rows are; The zeros are filled in, not measured; The last year is a cliff, not a collapse; Whether a party is an Article 5 party is not in the file; ODP tonnes are weighted by how much damage a substance does, not by its mass; Eight aggregates share the entity column with the 169 countries: the continents, the EU-28 and World; The download has one column per chemical family and no total - Checked: 2026-09-15 ### Access to clean cooking fuels, every country, 2000 onwards - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#owid-clean-cooking - Download page: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/access-to-clean-fuels-and-technologies-for-cooking - Publisher: WHO Global Health Observatory, processed by Our World in Data. Place: Global. Issues: People and development, Air quality, Energy and emissions. Licence: Cite the World Health Organization and Our World in Data. WHO's terms govern the numbers; Our World in Data's CC BY covers their compilation of them. - One row: One country in one year: the percentage of the population whose main cooking fuel and technology are clean ones. - Covers: 215 entities, 201 of them countries, 2000 to 2024, with no missing years - Three lines: no partner in this list yet; the student brings the other side (fieldwork, or a file they find and check) - Plans (line 3): Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana, India's free LPG connection scheme; Sustainable Development Goal 7.1, universal access to clean cooking by 2030; The WHO guidelines on indoor air quality for household fuel combustion - Traps: Every value is a whole number; 643 rows sit at exactly 100; It is modelled, not counted; The aggregates are different here from the other Our World in Data files: fourteen of them, mostly UN regions with a blank code, plus World; The value column is 123 characters long and ends "Residence area type: Total", which is telling you that urban and rural versions exist and you have neither; A percentage of a population is not a number of people - Checked: 2026-09-15 ### Electricity mix and energy use, every country, 1985 onwards - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#owid-energy-mix - Download page: https://github.com/owid/energy-data - Publisher: Our World in Data, compiled from Ember, the Energy Institute and others. Place: Global. Issues: Energy and emissions, Climate and weather, People and development. Licence: Our World in Data's compilation is CC BY and asks you to credit them and the underlying provider, which here means naming Ember or the Energy Institute for whichever column you used. The codebook names the source column by column, so you can look it up rather than guess. - One row: One country in one year, with about 130 columns of energy and electricity figures beside it. Any one question uses three or four of them. - Covers: 314 entities, 220 of them countries, years running 1900 to 2025. The electricity columns only start in 1985, and that is the limit that matters. - Three lines: no partner in this list yet; the student brings the other side (fieldwork, or a file they find and check) - Plans (line 3): The Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz, the renewable energy act at the centre of Germany's Energiewende; France's nuclear programme, from the Messmer plan to the current energy programming; The EU Renewable Energy Directive - Traps: A third aggregate convention, different again; 113 of the 127 data columns are less than half filled; The years say 1900 and the electricity says 1985; A share and a quantity are different findings; The change columns are already calculated; The codebook is a separate file in the same repository - Checked: 2026-09-15 ### Atmospheric CO2 at Mauna Loa, monthly since 1958 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#noaa-mauna-loa - Download page: https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/ - Publisher: NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory. Place: Global. Issues: Energy and emissions, Climate and weather. Licence: NOAA data are freely available and freely usable. Cite the laboratory and the series, and give the date you downloaded it, because the last months are revised. - One row: One month at one observatory: the mean CO2 concentration in parts per million. - Covers: 822 monthly values, March 1958 to August 2026, from a single station in Hawaii - Three lines: no partner in this list yet; the student brings the other side (fieldwork, or a file they find and check) - Plans (line 3): The Paris Agreement; The Climate Change Act 2008 and the UK carbon budgets; The Montreal Protocol, as the contrast - Traps: Forty comment lines before the header; Missing values are −9.99 and −1, not blanks; There are two CO2 columns and they answer different questions; The series starts in March 1958, not January, so the first year is incomplete and a naive annual mean for 1958 is a mean of ten months; The last few months are provisional and change; One observatory on one mountain in the Pacific - Checked: 2026-09-15 ### GISTEMP, global surface temperature anomalies since 1880 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#nasa-gistemp - Download page: https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/ - Publisher: NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Place: Global. Issues: Climate and weather, Energy and emissions. Licence: NASA GISS data carry no copyright restriction. Cite GISTEMP, the version, and the date you downloaded it; the analysis is updated monthly and past months can move. - One row: One year: twelve monthly anomalies in °C against the 1951 to 1980 average, plus annual and seasonal summaries of the same year. - Covers: 147 years, 1880 to 2026, for the globe; the same page carries hemispheres and zones - Three lines: no partner in this list yet; the student brings the other side (fieldwork, or a file they find and check) - Plans (line 3): The Kyoto Protocol; The 1.5 °C limit, and the report behind it; The Paris Agreement's temperature goal - Traps: The header is on the second row; Missing values are three asterisks; Monthly and summary columns sit in the same row; J-D and D-N are not the same year; An anomaly is a difference from the 1951 to 1980 average, not a temperature; The last row is a part-year - Checked: 2026-09-15 ### Mean sea level, tide gauge by tide gauge - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#psmsl - Download page: https://psmsl.org/data/obtaining/ - Publisher: Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level, National Oceanography Centre. Place: Global. Issues: Climate and weather, Ice and snow. Licence: Free to use with the source acknowledged. PSMSL asks that you cite the database and the date you retrieved it, because stations are revised as national authorities resupply them. - One row: One station in one month: mean sea level in millimetres above that station's own Revised Local Reference datum, which sits about 7,000 mm below the local mean. - Covers: 1,620 stations worldwide. Station 1 is Brest and it carries 2,622 monthly values from 1807 to 2025, which is the count behind this card. - Three lines: no partner in this list yet; the student brings the other side (fieldwork, or a file they find and check) - Plans (line 3): The Dutch Delta Programme; Thames Estuary 2100; MOSE, the Venice barriers - Traps: Missing months are −99999; There is no header row; The date is a decimal year; The datum is local, and this is the trap that matters; A tide gauge measures the sea against the land, and the land moves; 348 of Brest's values carry an attention flag in the fourth column - Checked: 2026-09-15 ### Sea surface temperature and coral bleaching alerts, reef by reef - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#coral-reef-watch - Download page: https://coralreefwatch.noaa.gov/product/vs/data.php - Publisher: NOAA Coral Reef Watch. Place: Global. Issues: Biodiversity, Climate and weather, Water pollution. Licence: NOAA data, freely usable. Cite Coral Reef Watch, the product version and the date you downloaded it; the series is extended daily. - One row: One reef region on one day: daily minimum, maximum and representative sea surface temperature, the anomaly, the HotSpot, accumulated heat stress and an alert level. - Covers: 214 named reef regions worldwide, daily from 1 January 1985. The Aden file counted here holds 15,231 days. - Three lines: no partner in this list yet; the student brings the other side (fieldwork, or a file they find and check) - Plans (line 3): Target 3 of the Kunming-Montreal framework, the 30 by 30 commitment; The International Coral Reef Initiative; The NOAA Coral Reef Conservation Program - Traps: Twenty-two lines of header before the column names; The header dates and the table dates are in different orders; The alert level is derived, not measured; The threshold is local, so raw temperature does not compare across reefs; One reef file is 15,231 daily rows and there are 214 of them, so a question about several reefs is three million rows; The series runs to yesterday, so the current year is always partial and any annual figure for it is a part-year, which matters most in the months when bleaching actually happens - Checked: 2026-09-15 ### Sea surface temperature over the Great Barrier Reef, every year since 1900 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#bom-gbr-sst - Download page: https://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/climate/change/timeseries.cgi?graph=sst&area=GBR&season=0112&ave_yr=0 - Publisher: Australian Bureau of Meteorology, calculated from NOAA's ERSST v5 sea surface temperature. Place: Australia. Issues: Climate and weather, Biodiversity. Licence: Free for study and research: acknowledge the Bureau of Meteorology's climate change time series, and NOAA ERSST v5 for the data underneath. Not to be redistributed or used commercially without the Bureau's permission. The graph on the page is CC BY 4.0. - One row: One year over the Great Barrier Reef: how far its mean sea surface temperature sat above or below the 1961 to 1990 average, across seven grid points in and beside the Marine Park. - Covers: 126 complete years, 1900 to 2025, none missing. The same page gives seven other Australian ocean regions in the same format - Three lines: no partner in this list yet; the student brings the other side (fieldwork, or a file they find and check) - Plans (line 3): The Reef 2050 Long-Term Sustainability Plan; The Climate Change Act 2022 and Australia's emissions targets; The Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program, and its cloud-brightening trials - Traps: The file is anomalies, not temperatures; Two averages, and they do not quite agree; No headings, and the first column is two dates run together; Seven points, 220 km apart; Ships, buoys and floats, and fewer of them early on; The numbers can change; Each year is one point, and it trends; Old links to the graph are dead - Checked: 2026-09-25 ### UK air quality, hour by hour at every monitoring site - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#uk-air - Download page: https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/data/data_selector_service - Publisher: DEFRA, through the Automatic Urban and Rural Network. Place: United Kingdom. Issues: Air quality, People and development. Licence: Crown copyright. UK-AIR publishes its conditions of use alongside the data: read them, and credit DEFRA, the network and the site by name. - One row: One hour at one monitoring site, with a measured value, a status letter and a unit for each pollutant the site runs. - Covers: Hundreds of sites. One site-year is 8,760 rows, one per hour; the London Marylebone Road file counted here holds 8,353 usable nitrogen dioxide values for 2023. - Three lines: no partner in this list yet; the student brings the other side (fieldwork, or a file they find and check) - Plans (line 3): The Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ); The Low Emission Zone; The congestion charge - Traps: Four lines of preamble, and the site's name sits on its own row; 134 columns for 44 pollutants; Column names carry HTML; Missing hours are blank, and there are hundreds; 2024 has 8,784 rows rather than 8,760; The status letter matters: R is ratified, P and P* are provisional; There is unusually heavy confounding here, and ignoring it is the main way to lose marks; For wildfire smoke, use Manchester Piccadilly (MAN3), not Marylebone Road; No PM2.5 at Manchester Piccadilly from 24 June to 12 July 2016; The PM2.5 unit changes name in 2020 - Checked: 2026-09-15 ### Swiss glacier length change, 1847 onwards - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#glamos - Download page: https://www.glamos.ch/en/downloads - Publisher: GLAMOS, Glacier Monitoring Switzerland. Place: The Alps. Issues: Ice and snow, Climate and weather. Licence: Free for scientific and non-commercial use with the source named. The file carries its own citation at the top, which is the one to copy: GLAMOS (2025), Swiss Glacier Length Change, release 2025, doi:10.18750/lengthchange.2025.r2025. - One row: One glacier over one observation interval: how far its tongue moved between two survey dates, in metres, with a minus sign for retreat. - Covers: 156 glaciers, 1847 to 2023, and 10,861 observations - Three lines: no partner in this list yet; the student brings the other side (fieldwork, or a file they find and check) - Plans (line 3): Covering the Rhône glacier in geotextile sheets; The Climate and Innovation Act; The Glacier Initiative - Traps: Six lines of citation, then three header rows; One row is an interval, not a year; 78% of start dates and 77% of end dates are flagged as not exactly known; 18% of all observations are advances; The tongue elevation column is empty in 84% of rows, so any question that needs altitude loses most of the dataset before it starts; The largest single value is −2,600 m, at Unterer Grindelwaldgletscher between September 2010 and September 2011; Coverage is very uneven - Checked: 2026-09-15 ### Snow depth and snowfall at Alpine stations, 1961 onwards - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#alpine-snow - Download page: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4064128 - Publisher: Matiu and others, compiled from six national weather services, published on Zenodo. Place: The Alps. Issues: Ice and snow, Climate and weather. Licence: CC BY 4.0. Cite the dataset and its DOI, and credit the national weather service whose file you used; the compilation is the authors' and the measurements are not. - One row: One station on one day: depth of snowfall in centimetres, and snow depth in centimetres, each in a raw version and a quality-checked one. - Covers: Over 2,000 stations across Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Slovenia and Switzerland, 1961 to 2020. The French file counted here holds 279 stations and 2,979,635 daily rows. - Three lines: no partner in this list yet; the student brings the other side (fieldwork, or a file they find and check) - Plans (line 3): The development plan for the Monts Jura ski area; Plan Avenir Montagnes; Snowmaking, and the hillside reservoirs (retenues collinaires) that feed it - Traps: The same measurement arrives three times; Half the file is empty, and that is normal; The set of stations changes over time; Altitude is not in the daily file; A day with no snowfall and a day with no observation both look like nothing if you are careless: zero is a measurement, blank is not; It stops in 2020 - Checked: 2026-09-15 ### UK greenhouse gas emissions by industry - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#ons-ghg-industry - Download page: https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/environmentalaccounts/datasets/ukenvironmentalaccountsatmosphericemissionsgreenhousegasemissionsbyeconomicsectorandgasunitedkingdom/current - Publisher: Office for National Statistics, compiled by Ricardo from the national inventory. Place: United Kingdom. Issues: Energy and emissions, People and development. Licence: Open Government Licence v3. Credit the Office for National Statistics, and note that the underlying inventory is compiled by Ricardo Energy and Environment. - One row: One industry in one year: emissions in thousand tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. The sheet stores it as a matrix, so one spreadsheet row is a year and one column is an industry. - Covers: 158 industry columns, 35 years from 1990 to 2024, on each of eight gas sheets - Three lines: no partner in this list yet; the student brings the other side (fieldwork, or a file they find and check) - Plans (line 3): The Climate Change Act 2008 and the carbon budgets; The UK Emissions Trading Scheme; The Climate Committee's advice, and what happens when it is ignored - Traps: It is a matrix, not a table; There is text inside the numbers; UK residence basis, not territorial; Two of the 158 columns are consumer expenditure, travel and non-travel; Eight sheets hold eight gases, and they are not interchangeable: methane and CO2 are already converted to CO2 equivalent, so adding the gas sheets to the total sheet counts everything twice; The last year is provisional - Checked: 2026-09-15 ### AQUASTAT, how much water each country takes and what it takes it for - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#aquastat - Download page: https://www.fao.org/aquastat/en/databases/maindatabase/ - Publisher: UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Place: Global. Issues: Rivers and lakes, Food and farming. Licence: CC BY 4.0, under FAO's statistical database terms. Cite FAO, AQUASTAT, the year of the last update and the date you accessed it. - One row: One variable for one country in one year. The file holds 199 variables in the same three columns, so every question starts by filtering to the variable it needs. - Covers: 182 countries and 19 regional aggregates, 1962 to 2022, for total water withdrawal; 936,332 rows across all 199 variables - Three lines: no partner in this list yet; the student brings the other side (fieldwork, or a file they find and check) - Plans (line 3): SDG target 6.4, water-use efficiency and water stress; The Murray-Darling Basin Plan; The EU Water Framework Directive - Traps: It is not UTF-8; Most of the numbers were never measured; Imputed means drawn as a straight line; Nineteen of the areas are not countries; Percentages above 100 are real; Coverage grows over time; The unit sits inside the variable name, `[10^9 m3/year]`, which is cubic kilometres; The last year is 2022 - Checked: 2026-09-23 ### Europe's land temperature, month by month since 1850 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#noaa-europe-temperature - Download page: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/climate-at-a-glance/global/time-series - Publisher: NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Climate at a Glance. Place: Europe. Issues: Climate and weather. Licence: NOAA data are in the public domain. Cite NCEI, Climate at a Glance, the series and the date you downloaded it; NOAA marks recent months as preliminary. - One row: One month over the land area of Europe: how far its average temperature was above or below that month's 1901 to 2000 average, in °C. - Covers: 2,120 monthly values, January 1850 to August 2026. The same tool gives the globe, each hemisphere, the Arctic and the other continents in the same format - Three lines: no partner in this list yet; the student brings the other side (fieldwork, or a file they find and check) - Plans (line 3): The EU Strategy on Adaptation to Climate Change; France's national heatwave plan; The Paris Agreement's 1.5 °C limit, seen from Europe - Traps: Three comment lines before the header; The date is one number; The warmest month is a February; Monthly values jump around; yearly ones do not; Three baselines, three zeros; The end year is part of the web address; 2026 has eight months, January to August - Checked: 2026-09-23 ### The Asse, nutrients from the Jura foothills to the lake - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#vaud-asse-nutrients - Download page: https://www.vhv-qualite.ch/xt_vh_718536/station_list.php?cfg=8 - Publisher: Canton of Vaud, Direction générale de l'environnement, through the Veille qualitative des eaux. Place: Switzerland. Issues: Water pollution, Rivers and lakes. Licence: No licence is stated. The platform marks its data "dépourvues de foi publique", not legally certified. Cite the DGE, the station code and the date you exported it, and ask the DGE before republishing the file itself. - One row: One measurement: one parameter in one water sample, taken on one date at one station. - Covers: 193 samples at 5 stations on the Asse, 2003 to 2025, in seven campaign years; only Calèves and Nyon Lac run across the whole period - Three lines: no partner in this list yet; the student brings the other side (fieldwork, or a file they find and check) - Plans (line 3): Ending the Gingins-Chéserex discharge into the Asse; The renaturation of the Asse through Nyon; The federal target for farm nutrient losses - Traps: There is no bulk download; The export needs the page, not the link; Campaigns, not years; 2009 at Nyon Lac is three samples; The sampling method changed; The criterion moves; Text in the number column; The station summary table uses a different statistic; It is an old-format .xls with French headings, and dates are written 04.12.2025, day first - Checked: 2026-09-23 ### Wolves in France, every piece of evidence since 2013 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#ofb-wolf-presence - Download page: https://www.data.gouv.fr/datasets/les-indices-de-presence-du-loup-recoltes-par-le-reseau-loup-lynx-depuis-le-01-01-2013-1 - Publisher: Office français de la biodiversité (OFB), Réseau Loup-Lynx. Place: France. Issues: Biodiversity, Food and farming. Licence: Licence Ouverte 2.0 (Etalab). Credit the OFB, Réseau Loup-Lynx, and give the date you downloaded it: the file is updated daily. - One row: One piece of evidence: a sighting, droppings, tracks, a howl, a carcass. Each has a date, a department, a commune and an expert verdict on whether it was a wolf. - Covers: 67,212 records, 1 January 2013 to August 2026, from 90 departments. 46,953 are confirmed as wolf, in 2,662 communes - Three lines: ready; pairs with Sheep on French farms, department by department, every year since 2010 - Plans (line 3): The National Action Plan on the wolf and livestock farming, 2024 to 2029; The EU downgrade of the wolf from strictly protected to protected - Traps: Records measure searching as well as wolves; Keep only Retenu; The location is blurred on purpose; The evidence types are single letters, and the file does not say what they mean; 45 confirmed records are duplicates; 2026 is a part year; Livestock attacks are not in this file - Checked: 2026-09-23 ### Geneva's official chestnut tree: the first leaf of spring since 1818 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#geneva-official-chestnut - Download page: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marronnier_officiel_de_Gen%C3%A8ve - Publisher: Grand Conseil de Genève (the sautier's register), transcribed on French Wikipedia. Place: Geneva. Issues: Climate and weather, Biodiversity. Licence: The dates come from the official register kept by the sautier of the Grand Conseil. Cite that, through the Grand Conseil's booklet Marronnier de la Treille 1818-2018, and cite the Wikipedia page you copied from, with the date you copied it. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. - One row: One spring: the date the sautier saw the first leaf open on the official tree, with the tree's number (1 to 4) and the sautier's name. - Covers: 209 springs, 1818 to 2026, one date each, observed on four trees in turn - Three lines: ready; pairs with When Switzerland's trees come into leaf: MeteoSwiss's phenology network - Questions on the three lines: Between 1955 to 1984 and 1986 to 2015, did the official tree come into leaf earlier by more than the horse chestnuts at MeteoSwiss's countryside stations? (MeteoSwiss phenology, one file per station.) - Plans (line 3): Geneva's urban tree strategy (Stratégie cantonale d'arborisation de l'aire urbaine); Geneva's cantonal climate plan (Plan climat cantonal 2030) - Traps: 2003 is labelled 2002; Autumn leaves are not spring; The dates are French text; The tree number and the sautier are merged cells; Four trees, not one; One tree in a city centre; Footnote numbers come with the copy; With 209 years, any trend is significant - Checked: 2026-09-24 ### When Switzerland's trees come into leaf: MeteoSwiss's phenology network - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#meteoswiss-phenology - Download page: https://opendatadocs.meteoswiss.ch/a-data-groundbased/a9-phenological-observations - Publisher: MeteoSwiss. Place: Switzerland. Issues: Climate and weather, Biodiversity. Licence: Open data under CC BY 4.0. Credit it as Source: MeteoSwiss, with the date you downloaded it. - One row: One station in one year: the day each stage was seen there, written as a number like 19540330, one column per plant and stage. - Covers: 175 stations, 1951 to 2026; horse chestnut leaf unfolding at 149 of them - Three lines: ready; pairs with Geneva's official chestnut tree: the first leaf of spring since 1818 - Questions on the three lines: Between 1955 to 1984 and 1986 to 2015, did Geneva's official chestnut, in the city centre, come into leaf earlier by more than the horse chestnuts at the countryside stations below 600 m? - Plans (line 3): The Federal Council's strategy for adapting to climate change in Switzerland - Traps: Not the same stage as Geneva's official tree; One file per station; The days are numbers, not dates; Blank means not recorded, never zero; Height sets the season; Some stations swing a long way; Three low stations are in cities - Checked: 2026-09-26 ### Monthly temperature at Geneva since 1753 and Sion since 1864 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#meteoswiss-ogd - Download page: https://opendatadocs.meteoswiss.ch/c-climate-data/c1-climate-stations_homogeneous - Publisher: MeteoSwiss, Swiss National Basic Climatological Network (Swiss NBCN). Place: Switzerland. Issues: Climate and weather. Licence: Open data under CC BY 4.0. Credit it as Source: MeteoSwiss, with the date you downloaded it, and do not make it look as if MeteoSwiss supports your work. - One row: One station in one month: the mean air temperature 2 m above the ground, in °C, corrected by MeteoSwiss to today's site and instruments, with 29 more columns about the same month. - Covers: Two stations: Geneva, January 1753 to August 2026, and Sion, January 1864 to August 2026 - Three lines: no partner in this list yet; the student brings the other side (fieldwork, or a file they find and check) - Plans (line 3): The Federal Council's strategy for adapting to climate change in Switzerland (Anpassung an den Klimawandel in der Schweiz); The Climate and Innovation Act, and the CO2 Act that voters rejected before it; Geneva's cantonal climate plan (Plan climat cantonal 2030) - Traps: Semicolons, not commas; The month is text, and Excel cannot hold a date before 1900; 2026 stops at August; Every column is corrected (homogenised); Both thermometers moved; The airport is not the city; Geneva before 1768 is not all Geneva; Use the monthly file, not the daily one; Each year is one point, and it trends; The numbers can change, and old links are dead - Checked: 2026-09-27 ### Kyoto's cherry blossom, peak bloom since the year 812 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#owid-kyoto-cherry-blossom - Download page: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/date-of-the-peak-cherry-tree-blossom-in-kyoto - Publisher: Yasuyuki Aono and Genki Katata, published by Our World in Data. Place: Japan. Issues: Climate and weather, Biodiversity. Licence: CC BY. Cite the original authors, Aono and Kazui (2008), Aono and Saito (2010) and Katata (2026), as well as Our World in Data, with the date you downloaded it. - One row: One year: the day of the year on which Kyoto's cherry trees reached full bloom. - Covers: 838 years with a date, from 812 to 2026. Every year since 1953 is present - Three lines: no partner in this list yet; the student brings the other side (fieldwork, or a file they find and check) - Plans (line 3): Japan's climate targets (NDC and Plan for Global Warming Countermeasures); Japan's urban heat island policy (Outline of the Policy Framework to Reduce Urban Heat Island Effects) - Traps: Most early years are missing; The early dates were not measured; Thirty-year average is not your data; One city, and a warm one; This is the wild mountain cherry; Leap years shift the day of the year by one; The record is 2023 - Checked: 2026-09-24 ### Japan's cherry blossom dates at every weather station since 1953 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#jma-sakura-flowering - Download page: https://www.data.jma.go.jp/sakura/data/index.html - Publisher: Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA). Place: Japan. Issues: Climate and weather, Biodiversity. Licence: JMA content may be reused with the source stated (the Government of Japan's standard terms). Credit the Japan Meteorological Agency and give the date you copied it. - One row: One station in one year: the month and day its standard cherry tree first flowered (開花, kaika) or reached full bloom (満開, mankai). - Covers: 102 stations have appeared since 1953; 58 were still observed in 2026, and 45 have every year from 1953 to 2026 - Three lines: ready (the pair is inside the file) - Questions on the three lines: Is the change in first-flowering date since the 1950s larger at stations in large cities than at stations in small towns? - Plans (line 3): Japan's urban heat island policy (Outline of the Policy Framework to Reduce Urban Heat Island Effects); Japan's climate targets (NDC and Plan for Global Warming Countermeasures) - Traps: Not every station watches the same tree; Stations have stopped; It arrives as text; Eight pages, eight years' headings; First flowering and full bloom are separate pages; The 平年値 column is an average, not a year; Station names are kanji - Checked: 2026-09-24 ### UK butterflies, species by species, every year since 1976 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#ukbms-collated-indices - Download page: https://catalogue.ceh.ac.uk/documents/7869969c-ac2d-450e-97c6-79d3d6a22a57 - Publisher: UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme (Butterfly Conservation, UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, British Trust for Ornithology, JNCC). Place: United Kingdom. Issues: Biodiversity, Food and farming. Licence: Open Government Licence. Cite the dataset with its DOI, as its catalogue page gives it, and include the attribution statement in the documentation. - One row: One species in one year in one country: its collated index of abundance, and how many sites it came from. - Covers: 59 species for the UK, 1976 to 2023, plus England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland separately - Three lines: ready; pairs with Dwellings in England, every year since 1969 - Plans (line 3): England's species abundance target (Environment Act 2021); The Sustainable Farming Incentive (England) - Traps: It is not the Big Butterfly Count; The index is not a count; Five countries in one file; The number of sites grew enormously; Species start in different years; Habitat specialist and wider countryside are JNCC's groups, not yours; Two versions - Checked: 2026-09-24 ### Dwellings in England, every year since 1969 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#mhclg-dwelling-stock - Download page: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/live-tables-on-dwelling-stock-including-vacants - Publisher: Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG). Place: United Kingdom. Issues: Land and forests, People and development. Licence: Open Government Licence v3.0. Credit the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, Live Table 104, and give the date of publication from the Cover sheet. - One row: One date for the whole of England: the estimated number of dwellings on that date, all together and split by tenure (who owns or rents them). From 1969 there is one date a year. - Covers: England, one count a year from 1969 to 2025, plus census counts every ten years from 1801 to 1961 (none for 1941) - Three lines: ready; pairs with UK butterflies, species by species, every year since 1976 - Questions on the three lines: Is the number of dwellings added in England each year related to the change in a butterfly species' England index from one year to the next, 1976 to 2023? (UK butterflies, England rows.) - Plans (line 3): Biodiversity Net Gain for new development in England; The target of 1.5 million homes in England in this Parliament; The Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 and its Nature Restoration Fund - Traps: The table is on the fourth sheet; Two rows for 1971 and two for 1981; The date of the count moves; A year is not always the same twelve months; Added is not built; Two years do not look like building; Each census corrects the years before it; Rounded up to 2001, provisional from 2022; The tenure columns start late and change method; A dwelling is not a hectare; The total rises every year - Checked: 2026-09-27 ### Renewable energy projects in the UK planning system, one by one, since 1990 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#desnz-repd - Download page: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/renewable-energy-planning-database-quarterly-extract - Publisher: Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ); Barbour ABI runs the database for it. Place: United Kingdom. Issues: Energy and emissions, Land and forests. Licence: Open Government Licence v3.0. Credit the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, Renewable Energy Planning Database, and give the edition (July 2026), because a new one replaces it every three months. - One row: One renewable electricity or storage project in one planning application: its technology, its size in megawatts, where it is, who decides, and the date it reached each stage, from application to operation. - Covers: 14,657 projects in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, 7,460 of them solar and 2,748 onshore wind, with applications from 1990 to 2026 - Three lines: no partner in this list yet; the student brings the other side (fieldwork, or a file they find and check) - Plans (line 3): The de facto ban on onshore wind in England, 2015 to 2024; England's National Planning Policy Framework, December 2024 and August 2026; Clean Power 2030 Action Plan; Scotland's Onshore Wind Policy Statement 2022 - Traps: It is not UTF-8; Development Status is only the latest stage; One stage, three spellings, and a heading with two spaces; The minimum size changed in 2021; Some projects have more than one row; Many solar farms are 49.9 MW; The coordinates are metres on the British National Grid, not latitude and longitude; Dates are text, and some have not happened yet; Solar Site Area is empty for more than half the solar rows; Who decides is not always a council; Not every row is one UK site; It is compiled, and it changes every three months - Checked: 2026-09-28 ### UK pollinators counted on flowers, in farmed and semi-natural squares, 2017 to 2022 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#poms-fit-counts - Download page: https://catalogue.ceh.ac.uk/documents/699f2172-88c1-44b7-a8f5-a22296a9e2cb - Publisher: UK Pollinator Monitoring Scheme (UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology and JNCC). Place: United Kingdom. Issues: Biodiversity, Food and farming. Licence: Open Government Licence. Cite the dataset with its DOI, as its catalogue page gives it, and include the acknowledgement the page asks for. - One row: One ten-minute count: the insects that landed on one 50 cm by 50 cm patch of one kind of flower, in ten groups, with the square's land cover, the habitat, the flower and the weather. - Covers: 92 randomly chosen 1 km squares in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, 2017 to 2022 - Three lines: ready (the pair is inside the file) - Questions on the three lines: Is the number of insects landing on flowers in a ten-minute count different in 1 km squares that are mainly farmland and squares that are mainly semi-natural, across the UK Pollinator Monitoring Scheme's squares, 2018 to 2022? | Is the number of bumblebees landing on thistles in a ten-minute count different in mainly farmed and mainly semi-natural 1 km squares across the UK, 2018 to 2022? - Plans (line 3): The National Pollinator Strategy for England - Traps: The flower decides a lot; Land cover goes with country; The square is the unit, not the count; land_cover and habitat_type are different things; The season and the weather change the count; 2017 was a pilot, and 2020 was cut short; Zeros are real; The public file is bigger, but people chose where to count - Checked: 2026-09-27 ### UK mean temperature, every month and year since 1884 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#met-office-uk-temperature - Download page: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/uk-and-regional-series - Publisher: Met Office National Climate Information Centre (HadUK-Grid). Place: United Kingdom. Issues: Climate and weather. Licence: Open Government Licence. Credit the Met Office, HadUK-Grid UK and regional series, give the "Last updated" date from line 5 of the file, and cite Hollis and colleagues (2019) in Geoscience Data Journal for how the grid is made. - One row: One year for the whole of the UK: the mean air temperature of each month, each season and the year, averaged over a 1 km grid built from the weather stations. - Covers: 142 complete years, 1884 to 2025, plus 2026 so far; the same for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland - Three lines: no partner in this list yet; the student brings the other side (fieldwork, or a file they find and check) - Plans (line 3): The Third National Adaptation Programme (NAP3); The Climate Change Act 2008 and the net zero target - Traps: Five lines of notes come first; It is not a CSV; The last row is this year, and it is not finished; Winter starts in the year before; Use the ann column, not your own average; It is not Central England Temperature; The numbers can change; Each year is one point, and it trends - Checked: 2026-09-25 ### Central England Temperature, every season and year since 1659 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#met-office-hadcet - Download page: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/data/download.html - Publisher: Met Office Hadley Centre (HadCET), kept up to date by the National Climate Information Centre. Place: United Kingdom. Issues: Climate and weather. Licence: Open Government Licence. Acknowledge the Met Office Hadley Centre (www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs), cite Parker, Legg and Folland (1992) in the International Journal of Climatology, as the Met Office asks, and give the version named on the download page and the date you downloaded. - One row: One year in central England: the mean air temperature of each season and of the whole year, from a few weather stations between Lancashire, London and Bristol. - Covers: 367 complete years, 1659 to 2025, plus 2026 so far. Daily values from 1 January 1772 - Three lines: no partner in this list yet; the student brings the other side (fieldwork, or a file they find and check) - Plans (line 3): The Third National Adaptation Programme (NAP3); The Climate Change Act 2008 and the net zero target - Traps: Sum means summer. Nothing is added up; Nine lines of notes come first, and it is not a CSV; -99.90 means missing, and the last row is not finished; Winter starts in the year before; Use the Annual column, not your own average; The early years are rounded; It is central England, not England or the UK; The warmth of towns has been taken out; The numbers have been revised; Each year is one point, and it trends - Checked: 2026-09-27 ### What UK boats land, species by species, and totals since 1938 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#mmo-uk-sea-fisheries - Download page: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/uk-sea-fisheries-annual-statistics-report-2024 - Publisher: Marine Management Organisation (MMO), UK Sea Fisheries Statistics. Place: United Kingdom. Issues: Biodiversity, Food and farming. Licence: Open Government Licence. Credit the Marine Management Organisation, UK Sea Fisheries Statistics 2024, and name the table you used. - One row: One species in one year: the weight (thousand tonnes) and value (£ million) that UK vessels landed. Other tables split this by port, sea area, gear and month. - Covers: 36 species and their group totals, 2020 to 2024 (Table 2.2); demersal, pelagic and shellfish totals from 1938 to 2024 (Table 2.7) - Three lines: no partner in this list yet; the student brings the other side (fieldwork, or a file they find and check) - Plans (line 3): The UK-EU catch limit for pollack in the Celtic Sea, Channel and West of Scotland; The Fisheries Act 2020 and the Joint Fisheries Statement - Traps: Pollack is not pollock; Only five years per species; Octopus has no row; Thousands of tonnes, to one decimal place; Landings are not catches, and not the stock; Value and quantity move differently; Do not download the underlying data file - Checked: 2026-09-24 ### Salmon caught on every river in England and Wales, 2008 to 2025 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#ea-nrw-salmon-rod-catch - Download page: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/salmonid-and-freshwater-fisheries-statistics-for-england-and-wales-2025 - Publisher: Environment Agency and Natural Resources Wales, with Cefas. Place: United Kingdom. Issues: Biodiversity, Rivers and lakes. Licence: Open Government Licence. Credit the Environment Agency and Natural Resources Wales, Salmonid and freshwater fisheries statistics for England and Wales 2025, and name the table. - One row: One river in one year: the number of salmon anglers declared they caught, including fish they released. - Covers: 84 rivers, 2008 to 2025, in Table 34. Other tables give the latest season by month, weight, sea age and fishing effort - Three lines: ready; pairs with Phosphate in the River Wye and the Lugg, sampled since 2000 - Plans (line 3): The River Wye Action Plan (England); Mandatory catch and release on the Wye and Usk - Traps: A catch is not a population; The Wye has not fallen most; Salmon are falling everywhere; Effort is only for the latest season; Released fish are included; The Wye is listed under Wales; Do not let one year carry the trend - Checked: 2026-09-24 ### Phosphate in the River Wye and the Lugg, sampled since 2000 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#ea-water-quality-wye - Download page: https://environment.data.gov.uk/water-quality/downloads - Publisher: Environment Agency, Water Quality Explorer. Place: United Kingdom. Issues: Water pollution, Rivers and lakes, Food and farming. Licence: Open Government Licence. Credit the Environment Agency Water Quality Explorer, and give the sampling point codes and the date you downloaded. - One row: One measurement of one substance in one water sample, with the sampling point, date and time, the result and its unit. - Covers: Monthly spot samples from 2000 to 2026 at dozens of points on the English Wye and its tributaries. Orthophosphate on the Lugg at Mordiford alone is 311 samples - Three lines: ready; pairs with Salmon caught on every river in England and Wales, 2008 to 2025 - Plans (line 3): Nutrient neutrality in the River Lugg catchment; The River Wye Action Plan (England), for this dataset - Traps: Results below the detection limit; Gaps; There are two River Wyes; One year per file, and everything in it; Monthly spot samples miss the blooms; England only; Orthophosphate is not total phosphorus - Checked: 2026-09-24 ### Signal crayfish in England's river invertebrate samples, 1965 to 2026 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#ea-signal-crayfish - Download page: https://environment.data.gov.uk/dataset/fa98090d-d715-4d34-80f9-bb7621aa7101 - Publisher: Environment Agency, Ecology & Fish Data Explorer (the Biosys database). Place: United Kingdom. Issues: Biodiversity, Rivers and lakes. Licence: Open Government Licence. Use the attribution on the dataset page, "© Environment Agency copyright and/or database right 2026. All rights reserved.", and give the catchment, the years and the date you downloaded. - One row: One sample: three minutes of kick sampling and a one-minute hand search at one river site on one day. The Taxa table has one row for each kind of animal found in it. The Metrics table has one row for the sample itself, whatever was found. - Covers: 280,833 samples at 30,715 sites across England, 1965 to 2026. Signal crayfish is in 3,047 of them, at 1,056 sites, from 1985. The Loddon catchment alone is 1,564 samples - Three lines: ready; pairs with Sewage spills from every storm overflow in England, 2020 to 2025 - Plans (line 3): The Invasive Alien Species (Enforcement and Permitting) Order 2019; The Great Britain Invasive Non-native Species Strategy 2023 to 2030; The Prohibition of Keeping of Live Fish (Crayfish) Order 1996, and its no-go areas; Ark sites for white-clawed crayfish in the River Aire catchment - Traps: Never type in the Taxon Name box; A crayfish that was not found has no row; Before 2014, many crayfish were named only as a family; Each crayfish has more than one name; The number of samples changed a lot; A kick sample is not a crayfish survey; Abundance is what the net caught; All of England is too big for a spreadsheet; The API leaves some out; Two kinds of catchment; The explorer opens on 2020; The water body code can be an old one - Checked: 2026-09-27 ### Sewage spills from every storm overflow in England, 2020 to 2025 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#ea-edm-storm-overflows - Download page: https://www.data.gov.uk/dataset/19f6064d-7356-466f-844e-d20ea10ae9fd/event-duration-monitoring-storm-overflows-annual-returns - Publisher: Environment Agency, from the water companies' Event Duration Monitoring (EDM) annual returns. Place: United Kingdom. Issues: Water pollution, Rivers and lakes. Licence: Open Government Licence. Use the attribution on the dataset page, "© Environment Agency copyright and/or database right 2025. All rights reserved.", and give the years and the date you downloaded. - One row: One storm overflow in one year: where it is, which water body and river or sea it runs into, how many hours it spilled, how many spills that makes by the 12-24 hour count, and for how much of the year its monitor was working. - Covers: Every storm overflow of the ten water and sewerage companies in England: 12,788 listed in 2020 and 14,303 in 2025, one file a year. A separate table gives national totals from 2016 - Three lines: ready; pairs with Signal crayfish in England's river invertebrate samples, 1965 to 2026 - Questions on the three lines: Do England's river water bodies where storm overflows spilled for more hours in 2025 have lower invertebrate scores (WHPT ASPT) in the Environment Agency's spring samples? | Across the river water bodies where Yorkshire Water's storm overflows discharge, is the number of spills in 2024 related to the invertebrate score (WHPT ASPT) of the same water body that year? - Plans (line 3): The Storm Overflows Discharge Reduction Plan; The Environment Act 2021: the storm overflow duties; The Water (Special Measures) Act 2025; Ofwat's investigation into sewage treatment works and sewerage networks; New designated bathing waters, including rivers - Traps: 2020 is different; Missing is not zero; A monitor that was off saw nothing; Is 90% written 90 or 0.9?; The hours change format; A spill count is not how often the overflow opened; The columns move; Not every water body code is a code; Follow an overflow by its Unique ID; Emergency overflows are mostly not here; A few values are impossible; No year column, and no volume; Spills follow the rain - Checked: 2026-09-28 ### Farmland in every Swiss canton, four surveys since 1979 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#bfs-land-use-cantons - Download page: https://www.bfs.admin.ch/asset/en/36761187 - Publisher: Federal Statistical Office (BFS), Swiss Land Use Statistics. Place: Switzerland. Issues: Land and forests, Food and farming, People and development. Licence: Open use. Credit the Federal Statistical Office (BFS), Swiss Land Use Statistics, and give the data status date (31 August 2026) and the date you downloaded. - One row: One land-use category in one canton in one survey period, in hectares. Pivot it so one row is one canton in one period. - Covers: 26 cantons in four national surveys (1979/85, 1992/97, 2004/09, 2013/18), plus a fifth survey (2020/25) already published for 10 cantons: 114 canton-periods in all - Three lines: ready; pairs with Asian hornets spreading across Switzerland, every record since 2017 - Plans (line 3): The revised Spatial Planning Act (RPG 1 / LAT 1); The sectoral plan for crop rotation areas (Sachplan Fruchtfolgeflächen); Summering contributions for alpine pastures - Traps: Alpine pasture is farmland here; Don't add the parent to its children; The periods are labels, not dates; 2014 falls inside a survey; Only 10 cantons have a fifth survey; The canton boundaries moved; It is a sample, not a census; Net change, not what became what - Checked: 2026-09-25 ### Wild boar crop damage in every Swiss canton since 1992 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#jagdstatistik-wild-boar - Download page: https://www.jagdstatistik.ch/fr/statistics?tt=2&dt=1&ar=CH&sp=%20350&yr%5Bfrom%5D=2024&yr%5Bto%5D=2024&dp=1 - Publisher: Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN), Swiss hunting statistics. Place: Switzerland. Issues: Biodiversity, Food and farming, Land and forests. Licence: No licence is stated. Cite the Swiss hunting statistics (FOEN, jagdstatistik.ch), the table (Dommages causés par le gibier), the years and the date you exported them. - One row: The wild boar damage paid out in one canton in one hunting year, in Swiss francs. - Covers: 25 cantons with boar damage at some point, hunting years 1992 to 2025: 854 canton-years. The same site gives boar shot per canton since 1933 and found dead since 1992 - Three lines: no partner in this list yet; the student brings the other side (fieldwork, or a file they find and check) - Plans (line 3): Geneva's hunting ban, and culling by state wardens; Compensation for damage by wild animals under the federal Hunting Act; Early detection of African swine fever in wild boar - Traps: One year per file, and no year in it; A missing canton is not a zero; The names won't join; Divide by area; Francs paid are not damage done; Hunting years, not calendar years; The range is still spreading; Big swings between years; Geneva shoots no boar; Sum the columns - Checked: 2026-09-25 ### US honey bee colonies lost, and what affected them, state by state every quarter since 2015 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#usda-honey-bee-colonies - Download page: https://esmis.nal.usda.gov/publication/honey-bee-colonies - Publisher: US Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS). Place: United States. Issues: Food and farming, Biodiversity. Licence: A US Government work, in the public domain. Cite NASS, the report's title and the date of every release you used. - One row: One state in one quarter: its colonies on the first day, the most it had, and the colonies lost, added and renovated; and, in a second table, the percentage of colonies affected by each of six stressors. - Covers: Up to 45 states, 46 quarters from January 2015 to June 2026, with April to June 2019 missing - Three lines: ready (the pair is inside the file) - Questions on the three lines: Is the percentage of honey bee colonies lost from January to March related to the percentage of colonies affected by pesticides in the same quarter, across the 20 US states named every year, 2015 to 2026? - Plans (line 3): The National Strategy to Promote the Health of Honey Bees and Other Pollinators - Traps: One release a year, and they overlap; Twenty states since July 2024; April to June 2019 is missing; The symbols are values; A state and the US divide by different numbers; These are livestock, not wild bees; A stressor is what the beekeeper reported; Winter is two quarters; Losses follow the seasons; Only operations with five or more colonies - Checked: 2026-09-27 ### European green crabs in Washington State's traps, every WDFW trap from 2018 to 2025 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#wdfw-green-crab - Download page: https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=7a2fde12ebbc40448e2c27b608c913e8 - Publisher: Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW), European Green Crab Hub. Place: United States. Issues: Biodiversity, Food and farming. Licence: No licence is stated. The item's page says: "No special restrictions or limitations on using the item's content have been provided." Cite the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, the layer (WDFW EGC Data Collection - PUBLIC) and the date you downloaded it. - One row: One trap set by WDFW: where and when it went in and came out, the kind of trap, why it was set, and how many green crabs were in it, male and female. A trap with no crabs has a row with 0. - Covers: 36,048 traps at about 310 sites in 12 management areas on Washington's outer coast and in the Salish Sea, set from July 2018 to October 2025 - Three lines: no partner in this list yet; the student brings the other side (fieldwork, or a file they find and check) - Plans (line 3): Emergency Proclamation 22-02: the green crab emergency; Emergency funding: $8.568 million in the 2022 supplemental budget, then about $6 million a year; European Green Crab 2025-2031 Management Plan for Washington; The Lummi Nation's disaster declaration - Traps: The traps follow the crabs; WDFW's own traps only; Count trap-days, not traps; Keep to one kind of trap; Zeros are real; Tidy the names before you group; Some traps appear two or three times; Twelve rows have impossible times; Two places hold almost every crab; Few crabs before 2020, and no 2026 yet; The hub's page for this dataset will not open - Checked: 2026-09-27 ### The Gulf of Mexico dead zone, every summer from 1985 to 2021 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#epa-roe-gulf-hypoxia - Download page: https://cfpub.epa.gov/roe/indicator.cfm?i=41 - Publisher: US Environmental Protection Agency, Report on the Environment, with data from LUMCON. Place: United States. Issues: Water pollution, Food and farming, Biodiversity. Licence: Public domain: US government work. Cite US EPA, Report on the Environment, "Hypoxia in the Gulf of America and Long Island Sound", data from LUMCON, with the exhibit number and the date you downloaded it. - One row: One summer: the area of seabed water with less than 2 mg/L of oxygen, mapped on a survey cruise of 5 to 7 days in late July. Exhibit 2's unit is one station on one cruise. - Covers: Every summer from 1985 to 2021 except 1989 and 2016, which were only half mapped: 35 years. Exhibit 2 adds 94 stations from the 2021 cruise - Three lines: ready; pairs with Nitrate carried down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, every year from 1979 to 2025 - Questions on the three lines: Was the Gulf dead zone larger in the summers after the Hypoxia Task Force's 2001 Action Plan (2002 to 2021) than before it (1985 to 2001)? - Plans (line 3): The Hypoxia Task Force's Gulf Hypoxia Action Plan; Iowa's voluntary Nutrient Reduction Strategy, and the lawsuit that challenged it - Traps: Search for the Gulf of America; Six lines of notes first; Null is not zero; One cruise a year; Weather breaks the pattern; Square miles against square kilometres; Exhibit 2 is one week in 2021; It stops in 2021 - Checked: 2026-09-25 ### Nitrate carried down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, every year from 1979 to 2025 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#usgs-mississippi-nitrate - Download page: https://doi.org/10.5066/P1BCA8QV - Publisher: US Geological Survey (USGS), National Water Quality Network. Place: United States. Issues: Water pollution, Food and farming, Rivers and lakes. Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain), as the USGS page states. Cite Klager, B.J., 2026, Trends in Nutrient and Other Water Quality Constituent Loads to the Gulf of America from the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers, 1980–2025 (ver. 3.0, May 2026): U.S. Geological Survey data release, https://doi.org/10.5066/P1BCA8QV, with the date you downloaded it. - One row: One site, one substance, one water year and one kind of estimate: the tons the river carried. For this card, the row where SITE_ABB is GULF, CONSTIT is NO3_NO2 and MODTYPE is WRTDS_K: the nitrate that the Mississippi and the Atchafalaya together carried to the Gulf from October to September. - Covers: 47 water years, 1979 to 2025, for the Mississippi near St. Francisville, the Atchafalaya at Melville, and the two added together - Three lines: ready; pairs with The Gulf of Mexico dead zone, every summer from 1985 to 2021; Brown and white shrimp landed in Louisiana and Texas, year by year since 1962 - Questions on the three lines: Across the summers from 1985 to 2021, is the area of the Gulf dead zone related to the nitrate load that the Mississippi and the Atchafalaya carried to the Gulf in the same water year? | Was the Gulf dead zone larger in the years when the rivers carried more nitrate than the median than in the years when they carried less, 1985 to 2021? - Plans (line 3): The Hypoxia Task Force's 2008 Action Plan and its 2015 goal framework; The 12 states' nutrient reduction strategies, such as Iowa's - Traps: Many rows for every year; Fourteen lines of notes first; A water year is not a calendar year; The forecasters use May; Wet years carry more nitrate; Actual or flow-normalised; US tons of nitrogen; Use the GULF row; The whole series is estimated again every year; Search for the Gulf of America; The download page checks your browser; The dead zone stops in 2021 - Checked: 2026-09-27 ### Brown and white shrimp landed in Louisiana and Texas, year by year since 1962 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#noaa-gulf-shrimp-landings - Download page: https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/national/sustainable-fisheries/commercial-fisheries-landings - Publisher: NOAA Fisheries, Office of Science and Technology, Fisheries One Stop Shop (FOSS). Place: United States. Issues: Biodiversity, Food and farming, Water pollution. Licence: Public information: NOAA Fisheries says what it publishes "may be distributed or copied". Cite it as FOSS asks: NOAA Fisheries Office of Science and Technology, Commercial Landings Query, available at www.fisheries.noaa.gov/foss, with the date you ran the query. - One row: One kind of shrimp landed in one state in one calendar year: its live weight in pounds, and what the boats were paid for it at the dock, in dollars of that year. - Covers: Brown and white shrimp landed in Louisiana and in Texas, 57 years each: 1962 to 1971 and 1978 to 2024. The same query gives Mississippi, Alabama and Florida's Gulf coast - Three lines: ready; pairs with Nitrate carried down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, every year from 1979 to 2025 - Questions on the three lines: Across the years 1979 to 2024, is the weight of brown shrimp landed in Louisiana related to the nitrate the Mississippi and the Atchafalaya carried to the Gulf in the same water year? - Plans (line 3): The Gulf shrimp fishery management plan and its Texas closure; The Hypoxia Task Force's 2008 Action Plan and its 2015 goal framework; Louisiana's spring inshore shrimp season, opened when the brown shrimp reach market size - Traps: A landing is not a catch, and a year is not a season; No species in 1972 to 1977, and none before 1962; Search for the right name; The first line is empty, and the numbers have commas; Live weight, not tails; Pounds are the shrimp; dollars are the market; Fewer boats, not only fewer shrimp; Storms and the oil spill; Scientists have found the dead zone hard to see in landings; Each year is one point, and landings drift; Florida has two coasts; If the page is blocked or busy - Checked: 2026-09-27 ### Possums, rats and forest birds before and after a 1080 poison drop - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#landcare-1080-possums-birds - Download page: https://doi.org/10.7931/J2ZW1J3R - Publisher: Manaaki Whenua – Landcare Research DataStore (Burge, Van Vianen, MacFarlane and Kelly). Place: New Zealand. Issues: Biodiversity, Land and forests. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0: reuse freely, credit Burge, Van Vianen, MacFarlane and Kelly with the DOI 10.7931/J2ZW1J3R, and share anything you publish from it under the same licence. - One row: Birds: one species in one five-minute count at one station. Mammals: one species on one line of ten chew cards on one visit. - Covers: Four South Island forests, two poisoned with 1080 in 2012 and two left alone, counted in winter 2012 and the three summers after: 2,006 bird counts and 240 chew-card lines - Three lines: ready (the pair is inside the file) - Questions on the three lines: Is the number of native birds per five-minute count higher in the 1080-treated forests than in the untreated forests, in the third summer after the drop? | How did the share of chew cards bitten by possums change in treated and untreated forests between winter 2012 and summer 2014/15? | Did bellbirds increase more in the treated forests than in the untreated forests after the 1080 drop? - Plans (line 3): Aerial 1080 poison drops; Predator Free 2050; The TBfree programme's possum control - Traps: Most rows are zero; Count the counts, not the rows; Before is winter, after is summer; 1080 kills rats and possums; Two names, one bird; Which birds are native?; Two forests per side; Dates are day/month/two-digit year - Checked: 2026-09-25 ### Lionfish spreading across the Mediterranean, every published record since 1991 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#ormef-lionfish-sst - Download page: https://ipt.gbif.org/resource?r=ormefmediterraneanexoticfishes - Publisher: ORMEF, Occurrence Records of Mediterranean Exotic Fishes (CNR-IRBIM, via GBIF). Place: Europe. Issues: Biodiversity. Licence: CC BY-NC 4.0: free for school work, credit Azzurro, Smeraldo and D'Amen (CNR-IRBIM). - One row: One published record of a lionfish at one place and date, with the paper it came from. - Covers: 2,019 lionfish records in 15 countries, 1991 to 2025, all with coordinates - Three lines: ready; pairs with Ship arrivals at each European country's main ports, every year since 1997 - Plans (line 3): RELIONMED-LIFE: early detection and targeted removal in Cyprus; The EU Regulation on invasive alien species (1143/2014) - Traps: Records are not population; No record is not proof of absence; Memories, not sightings; Twenty years of nothing; Year-only dates; Use this copy - Checked: 2026-09-25 ### Sharks caught off Queensland's beaches, month by month since 1996 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#qld-shark-control-sst - Download page: https://www.data.qld.gov.au/dataset/fisheries-queensland-s-shark-control-program-information-and-data - Publisher: Queensland Department of Primary Industries, Shark Control Program. Place: Australia. Issues: Biodiversity. Licence: CC BY 4.0: credit the Queensland Government, Shark Control Program. - One row: One kind of animal caught on one kind of gear at one beach in one month, with how many were caught. - Covers: Every month from January 1996 to May 2026, at 181 beaches in 12 areas from Cairns to the Gold Coast: 23,118 rows, 14,776 of them sharks up to 2023 - Three lines: ready (the pair is inside the file) - Questions on the three lines: Do nets and drumlines differ in the share of their shark catch that is white sharks, in the four areas that set both gears, 1996 to 2023? - Plans (line 3): Queensland's Shark Control Program: nets and drumlines at popular beaches; No killing inside the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, and catch alert drumlines - Traps: The gear changed in 2024; Catch is not the number of sharks; Add up NumberCaught, don't count rows; White sharks are rare; Names with a star are a group, not a species; The 2026 rows stop in May - Checked: 2026-09-25 ### Sharks caught in the Atlantic by every fishing nation since 1950, and the ban on landing makos - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#iccat-shark-catches - Download page: https://www.iccat.int/en/accesingdb.html - Publisher: ICCAT, the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (Task 1 nominal catch). Place: Atlantic Ocean. Issues: Biodiversity, Food and farming. Licence: ICCAT publishes Task 1 openly under its rules on data dissemination; no licence is named. Credit ICCAT, Task 1 nominal catch, and give the version date (2026-01-28). - One row: The tonnes of one species that one fleet caught with one kind of gear in one area in one year, either landed or thrown back dead. - Covers: Every year from 1950 to 2024, 80 flags and 99 kinds of shark: 21,516 shark rows, 15,556 of them with a catch above zero - Three lines: ready; pairs with GDP per person in every country, every year since 1990, at 2021 prices - Questions on the three lines: Across the countries whose fleets catch North Atlantic shortfin mako, is the tonnage caught related to the country's GDP per person, 1990 to 2021? | After the ban on keeping North Atlantic shortfin mako in 2022, did the total dead catch (landed plus dead discards) fall below ICCAT's 250 t limit, and what share of it was thrown back dead? | Did porbeagle landings fall more in the North-east Atlantic, after the EU's zero catch limit in 2010, than in the North-west Atlantic over the same years? - Plans (line 3): ICCAT's ban on keeping North Atlantic shortfin mako (Recommendation 21-09); CITES Appendix II for porbeagle (2014) and mako sharks (2019) - Traps: Don't read the Pivot sheet; Choose the stock; Add the dead discards to the landings; More countries reported over time; Tonnes caught is not the number of sharks alive; 5,960 rows are zero; Estimated rows; 2024 is the latest year and may still be revised - Checked: 2026-09-25 ### Every recorded shark bite in Australia since 1791 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#asid-shark-bites - Download page: https://zenodo.org/records/22262542 - Publisher: Taronga Conservation Society Australia, the Australian Shark-Incident Database (with Flinders University and NSW DPI). Place: Australia. Issues: Biodiversity. Licence: CC BY 4.0: credit Taronga Conservation Society Australia, Australian Shark-Incident Database, and cite Riley and colleagues (2022) in Scientific Data for how it was built. - One row: One shark bite on a person, or on their board or boat, with where and when it happened, the shark thought responsible and what the person was doing. - Covers: 1,304 incidents with a year and month, 1791 to June 2026, in every state and the Northern Territory; 874 unprovoked - Three lines: no partner in this list yet; the student brings the other side (fieldwork, or a file they find and check) - Plans (line 3): New South Wales: shark nets, SMART drumlines and drones; Western Australia: drum lines in 2014, then a rebate on personal deterrents - Traps: Warm months are also busy months; The nets are seasonal; A month with no bite has no row; Decide on provoked bites before you look; Tidy the text first; The shark is often a judgement; The file's own water temperature is nearly empty; The record grew with the coast's population - Checked: 2026-09-25 ### Sea surface temperature at any point on the ocean, month by month since 1981 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#noaa-oisst - Download page: https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.noaa.oisst.v2.highres.html - Publisher: NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory, OISST v2.1 (Optimum Interpolation Sea Surface Temperature). Place: Global. Issues: Climate and weather, Biodiversity. Licence: Public domain: credit NOAA PSL, OISST v2.1. - One row: One month at one quarter-degree point on the sea: the mean sea surface temperature in °C. - Covers: Every month from September 1981 to August 2026 at any sea point on Earth, on a quarter-degree grid: 540 months for each point you ask for - Three lines: no partner in this list yet; the student brings the other side (fieldwork, or a file they find and check) - Plans (line 3): The Paris Agreement's temperature goal - Traps: One point at a time; Your point moves; Land and lakes return NaN; Choose the point and the month before you look; It is the surface - Checked: 2026-09-25 ### Wolf attacks on livestock in France, canton by canton, 2010 to 2022 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#france-wolf-attacks-canton - Download page: https://pna-loup.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/bilans-de-dommages-a12.html - Publisher: French Ministry for Ecological Transition, national wolf plan (PNA loup et activités d'élevage), from the Géoprédateur claims database. Place: France. Issues: Biodiversity, Food and farming. Licence: Licence Ouverte, under the site's legal notice. Credit: Ministère de la Transition écologique, PNA loup et activités d'élevage, données Géoprédateur (extracted 19/01/2024). - One row: One canton (or one piece of a canton) in one year: the number of compensated attack reports, and the animals killed or injured, by species. - Covers: 2010 to 2022, 408 cantons in 58 departments: 34,995 compensated reports, rising from 1,079 in 2010 to 3,984 in 2022, and 109,673 sheep killed or injured - Three lines: no partner in this list yet; the student brings the other side (fieldwork, or a file they find and check) - Plans (line 3): The national wolf plan 2024-2029, and its ceiling on culling; Compensation for losses, conditional on protecting the flock; State aid for protecting flocks: shepherds, guard dogs and electric fencing - Traps: Blank cells mean "same as above"; The last row is a grand total; Three rows have no place; One canton can take several rows in one year; A missing canton-year means no paid claim, not missing data; It counts paid claims, not attacks; Today's cantons for every year; It stops in 2022 - Checked: 2026-09-25 ### Sheep on French farms, department by department, every year since 2010 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#france-sheep-by-department - Download page: https://agreste.agriculture.gouv.fr/agreste-web/disaron/SAA-SeriesLongues/detail/ - Publisher: Agreste, the statistics service of the French Ministry of Agriculture (Statistique agricole annuelle). Place: France. Issues: Food and farming. Licence: Licence Ouverte (Etalab). Credit: Agreste, Statistique agricole annuelle, SSP, Ministère de l'Agriculture. - One row: One kind of farm animal in one department, with its head count at the end of each year from 2010 to 2025, one column per year. - Covers: 100 departments (Paris is absent), 2010 to 2025, with 2025 provisional. France's sheep: 7,945,548 in 2010 and 6,449,154 in 2025 - Three lines: ready; pairs with Wolves in France, every piece of evidence since 2013 - Questions on the three lines: Across French departments, is the number of confirmed wolf records related to the number of sheep kept on farms, 2013 to 2025? - Plans (line 3): State aid for protecting flocks: shepherds, guard dogs and electric fencing; The national wolf plan 2024-2029 - Traps: The headings are on row 6; Years run across, not down; "dont" means "of which"; Department codes have three characters here; Sheep are counted at the farm, in December; Some figures are estimates, and are flagged; Some years just repeat; Each edition rewrites the whole series - Checked: 2026-09-25 ### Ship arrivals at each European country's main ports, every year since 1997 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#eurostat-vessel-arrivals - Download page: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/mar_mt_am_csvi/default/table?lang=en - Publisher: Eurostat, maritime transport statistics (mar_mt_am_csvi). Place: Europe. Issues: People and development, Biodiversity. Licence: Free reuse with the source acknowledged. Credit: Eurostat, mar_mt_am_csvi. - One row: One country in one year, for one type of vessel and one unit: for example, the number of vessels arriving in Greece's main ports in 2019. - Covers: 1997 to 2024, 26 countries and 5 EU groups, with series starting in different years: Croatia 2005, Cyprus 2002, France 1998, Greece and Italy 2000, Malta 2003, Türkiye 2007 - Three lines: ready; pairs with Lionfish spreading across the Mediterranean, every published record since 1991 - Questions on the three lines: Is the year lionfish were first recorded in a Mediterranean country related to the number of vessels arriving at its main ports? - Plans (line 3): The IMO Ballast Water Management Convention; The EU Regulation on invasive alien species (1143/2014) - Traps: Some rows are percentages, not counts; An arrival is a port call, not a ship; Jumps with no warning; A missing year has no row; EU totals sit among the countries; One number covers every coast; Codes that do not match other files - Checked: 2026-09-25 ### Municipal waste per person in 37 European countries, and what happens to it, every year since 1995 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#eurostat-waste - Download page: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/env_wasmun/default/table?lang=en - Publisher: Eurostat, municipal waste statistics (env_wasmun). Place: Europe. Issues: People and development, Energy and emissions. Licence: Free reuse with the source acknowledged. Credit: Eurostat, env_wasmun. - One row: One country in one year, for one thing that happens to its waste: for example, the kilograms of municipal waste per person that Greece landfilled in 2022. - Covers: 1995 to 2024, 37 countries and the EU total: the 27 EU members, Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, Türkiye, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia. Not the UK. Series start later in Croatia (1997), Serbia (2006), Bosnia and Herzegovina and North Macedonia (2008), Montenegro (2011), Albania (2013) and Kosovo (2015) - Three lines: no partner in this list yet; the student brings the other side (fieldwork, or a file they find and check) - Plans (line 3): The EU's targets for recycling municipal waste (Waste Framework Directive, amended by Directive (EU) 2018/851); The EU's limit on landfill: 10% of municipal waste by 2035 (Landfill Directive, amended by Directive (EU) 2018/850); Switzerland's Waste Ordinance (ADWO): combustible waste is burned, not landfilled - Traps: Ten kinds of row share one number column; The recycling rate is a calculation you do; The rules changed from 2020; Some figures are estimates; A missing year has no row; A 0 is a real value; Municipal waste is not all waste; Waste sent abroad is counted at home; The EU total sits among the countries, and the codes are not ISO; Each release rewrites the series - Checked: 2026-09-28 ### Food waste per person in 29 European countries, at each stage of the food chain, 2020 to 2023 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#eurostat-food-waste - Download page: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/env_wasfw/default/table?lang=en - Publisher: Eurostat, food waste statistics (env_wasfw). Place: Europe. Issues: Food and farming, People and development. Licence: Free reuse with the source acknowledged. Credit: Eurostat, env_wasfw. - One row: One country in one year, for one stage of the food chain: for example, the kilograms of food waste per person from households in Italy in 2022. - Covers: 2020 to 2023: the 27 EU members and Norway in every year, Iceland in 2022 and 2023, and the EU total. Not Switzerland or the UK - Three lines: no partner in this list yet; the student brings the other side (fieldwork, or a file they find and check) - Plans (line 3): The EU's binding food waste targets (Directive (EU) 2025/1892, amending the Waste Framework Directive) - Traps: Six kinds of row share one number column; Four years, starting in 2020; 2020 may not be typical; "Waste collected" is not what it says; Methods change from year to year; Some definitions differ; Food waste includes the parts nobody eats; A year, not a week; Who is in it; Slovenia's primary production is 0 in all four years - Checked: 2026-09-28 ### Boats registered in every Swiss canton, every year since 1980 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#bfs-registered-boats - Download page: https://www.bfs.admin.ch/asset/fr/36331818 - Publisher: Federal Statistical Office (OFS/BFS), from the Association of Swiss navigation offices. Place: Switzerland. Issues: People and development, Rivers and lakes. Licence: Open use, with the source given. Credit: OFS, Association des services de la navigation, Effectif des bateaux. - One row: One canton in one year's sheet: the boats registered there on 30 September, by kind of boat. - Covers: 1980 to 2025, 26 cantons, 46 sheets - Three lines: ready; pairs with Quagga mussels spreading through Swiss lakes, every record since 2016 - Questions on the three lines: Have quagga mussels been recorded in more of the Swiss cantons with many registered boats than of those with few, 2016 to 2025? - Plans (line 3): The cantons' duty to clean boats that move between lakes - Traps: One sheet per year; The Total column moves; Regions sit between the cantons; The kinds of boat were redrawn in 2014; Two kinds of missing; Boats are counted where they are registered, not where they sail - Checked: 2026-09-25 ### Quagga mussels spreading through Swiss lakes, every record since 2016 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#infofauna-quagga-mussel - Download page: https://ipt.gbif.ch/resource?r=cscf-mol - Publisher: info fauna (CSCF), Swiss National Mollusca Databank, published through the GBIF Swiss data server. Place: Switzerland. Issues: Biodiversity, Rivers and lakes. Licence: CC BY 4.0. Credit: info fauna (CSCF), Swiss National Mollusca Databank. - One row: One record of one mollusc species on one date at one point, placed on a 5 km grid. - Covers: 344,823 records of all molluscs, 1840 to 2025; 373 quagga mussel records in Switzerland, 2016 to 2025, in 18 cantons - Three lines: ready; pairs with Boats registered in every Swiss canton, every year since 1980 - Plans (line 3): Cleaning rules for boats that change lake, canton by canton - Traps: You download every Swiss snail and mussel; Two mussels with similar names; Not only Switzerland; No lake column; A record is not an arrival; Rows pile up - Checked: 2026-09-25 ### Asian hornets spreading across Switzerland, every record since 2017 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#infofauna-asian-hornet - Download page: https://ipt.gbif.ch/resource?r=cscf-ves - Publisher: info fauna (CSCF), Swiss National Vespoidea Databank, published through the GBIF Swiss data server. Place: Switzerland. Issues: Biodiversity, Food and farming. Licence: CC BY 4.0. Credit: info fauna (CSCF), Swiss National Vespoidea Databank (doi.org/10.15468/vm34mn), with the version number and the date you downloaded. - One row: One report of the Asian hornet on one date, placed on a 5 km square. It may be one hornet or a nest: the file does not say which. - Covers: 103,997 records of wasps and ants, 1855 to 2026; 19,950 Asian hornet records in Switzerland, 2017 to 2026, in 22 cantons - Three lines: ready; pairs with Farmland in every Swiss canton, four surveys since 1979 - Questions on the three lines: Are there more Asian hornet records per km² in the Swiss cantons where settlements cover a larger share of the land, 2025? - Plans (line 3): The Swiss Strategy on Invasive Alien Species; The cantons' recommendations for managing the Asian hornet (Cercle Exotique); Geneva's plan against the Asian hornet; Jura's revised strategy against the Asian hornet - Traps: You download every Swiss wasp and ant; Two hornets; Not only Switzerland, and FR means two things; A row is a report, not a hornet or a nest; Reporting changed as well as the hornet; Every point is a 5 km square; Many rows repeat; One record is not a colony; Stop at 2025; Most reports come in late summer and autumn - Checked: 2026-09-27 ### Wolves in the canton of Schwyz, every record since 2023 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#grossraubtiere-sz - Download page: https://www.sz.ch/umweltdepartement/amt-fuer-wald-und-natur/jagd-und-wildtiere/wildtiere/wolf.html/8756-8758-8802-9447-9454-9460-10683-10693 - Publisher: Amt für Wald und Natur (the forest and nature office), Canton of Schwyz. Place: Switzerland. Issues: Biodiversity, Food and farming. Licence: No licence is stated on the file or on the canton's wolf page. Cite the Amt für Wald und Natur, Kanton Schwyz, the file name (Hinweise Grossraubtiere.xlsx) and the date you downloaded it. - One row: One record of a wolf: a camera-trap photo, a sighting, droppings, tracks or a kill. Each has a date, a commune, a map point and how sure the canton is that it was a wolf. - Covers: 409 records, 14 January 2023 to 23 September 2026, from 21 of the canton's 30 communes, and 8 from outside the canton - Three lines: ready; pairs with Sheep on Swiss farms, canton by canton and commune by commune, since 1975 - Plans (line 3): Culling young wolves from the Chöpfenberg pack (Proaktive Regulierung des Chöpfenberg-Rudels); The revised Hunting Act and Hunting Ordinance (Jagdgesetz, JSG, and Jagdverordnung, JSV): culling packs before they cause damage; Federal money for herd protection (Herdenschutz); The Bern Convention's downgrade of the wolf, from strictly protected to protected - Traps: One canton, and only wolves; Leave out ausserkantonal; Everything is text; It changes almost every day; Records measure searching as well as wolves; Sure or probable; One event can be several rows; It starts in 2023; Swiss map points; Kills are records too - Checked: 2026-09-27 ### Sheep on Swiss farms, canton by canton and commune by commune, since 1975 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#bfs-sheep-by-canton - Download page: https://www.bfs.admin.ch/asset/de/px-x-0702000000_104 - Publisher: Federal Statistical Office (BFS), agricultural structure survey (Landwirtschaftliche Strukturerhebung). Place: Switzerland. Issues: Food and farming. Licence: Open use, with the source given. Credit: BFS, Landwirtschaftliche Strukturerhebung, STAT-TAB px-x-0702000000_104, data status 12 May 2026, and the date you downloaded it. - One row: One place in one year: the sheep kept on its farms, counted in the commune where each farm is registered. A place can be Switzerland, a canton, a district or a commune. - Covers: Switzerland, 26 cantons and 2,115 communes, in 28 years from 1975 to 2025, and every year since 2010. 355,639 sheep in Switzerland in 2025 - Three lines: ready; pairs with Wolves in the canton of Schwyz, every record since 2023 - Questions on the three lines: Across the 30 communes of the canton of Schwyz, is the number of wolf records related to the number of sheep kept on farms, 2023 to 2025? - Plans (line 3): Federal money for herd protection (Herdenschutz); The Hunting Ordinance's rule on reasonable protection (zumutbare Schutzmassnahmen) - Traps: The count moved from May to January in 2015; Four levels in one list; Strip the dots and the number; Canton names in two or three languages; Choose Total, not every kind of farm; Only farms are counted; Counted at home, in winter; Some years are missing; Today's communes for every year; Years may arrive as columns - Checked: 2026-09-27 ### Swiss breeding birds by group, migrants included, every year since 1990 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#vogelwarte-swiss-bird-index - Download page: https://www.vogelwarte.ch/en/research/breeding-population-trends/ - Publisher: Swiss Ornithological Institute (Schweizerische Vogelwarte Sempach). Place: Switzerland. Issues: Biodiversity, Food and farming, Climate and weather. Licence: No licence is stated for the file, which the institute publishes for download with a sheet on how to cite it. Cite the report the page names (Strebel and others, The State of Birds in Switzerland), the file name, SBI_2025.xlsx, and the date you downloaded it. - One row: One group of bird species in one year: its index, where 1990 is 100, with its lower and upper 95% limits and the number of species in the group that year. - Covers: 15 groups of Swiss breeding birds, 1990 to 2025 - Three lines: no partner in this list yet; the student brings the other side (fieldwork, or a file they find and check) - Plans (line 3): The environmental objectives for agriculture (Umweltziele Landwirtschaft); The Swiss Biodiversity Strategy and its Action Plan - Traps: An index, not a count; The whole series is recalculated every year; The last year is the least sure; The groups overlap; The species in a group change; Choose your group before you look; Migrants are counted only while they breed here; Groups, not species - Checked: 2026-09-27 ### Tree cover lost in every country, state and province, every year since 2001 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#global-forest-watch - Download page: https://globalnaturewatch.org/dashboards/global/ - Publisher: Global Nature Watch, formerly Global Forest Watch (World Resources Institute), from the University of Maryland's Global Forest Change data. Place: Global. Issues: Land and forests, Biodiversity, Food and farming. Licence: CC BY 4.0. Cite Hansen and others (2013) for tree cover loss and Sims and others (2025) for its drivers, as the workbook's ReadMe sheet lists them, with the date you downloaded it. - One row: One country, or one state or province, at one canopy threshold: its tree cover in 2000 and 2010, and the hectares of it lost in each year from 2001 to 2025, one column per year. - Covers: 226 countries and their states and provinces, 2001 to 2025, each at eight canopy thresholds from 0 to 75%. 109 countries had at least 1 million hectares of tree cover in 2000 - Three lines: ready; pairs with Cattle in each Brazilian state, every year since 1974; Protected land in every country, as a share of its land, every year since 2013; GDP per person in every country, every year since 1990, at 2021 prices - Questions on the three lines: Across the countries with at least 1 million hectares of tree cover, is the share of land protected in 2015 related to the share of tree cover lost from 2016 to 2025? | Across Brazil's 27 states, is the share of tree cover lost from 2001 to 2023 related to how much each state's cattle herd grew? - Plans (line 3): The Glasgow Leaders' Declaration on Forests and Land Use; Brazil's action plan against deforestation in the Legal Amazon (PPCDAm) - Traps: Every country is there eight times; Names, never codes; China, India and Pakistan appear more than once; Tree cover is not forest, and loss is not deforestation; Fire years stand out; The method changed between 2011 and 2015; Hectares favour big countries; The site has a new name - Checked: 2026-09-26 ### Area burnt and number of fires in 31 countries around Europe and the Mediterranean, every year since 1980 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#effis-burnt-area - Download page: https://forest-fire.emergency.copernicus.eu/applications/data-and-services - Publisher: The European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), run by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre for the Copernicus Emergency Management Service, from the figures each country reports. Place: Europe. Issues: Land and forests, Air quality. Licence: CC BY 4.0, under the EFFIS data licence. Cite the report the figures come from: Sedano and others (2025), Forest Fires in Europe, Middle East and North Africa 2024, Publications Office of the European Union, with the date you downloaded the workbook. - One row: One country in one year: the hectares burnt and the number of fires its fire service reported. Each country is a column, and each year is a row. - Covers: 31 countries, 1980 to 2024. Portugal, Spain, France, Italy and Greece from 1980, 13 more from the 1990s, and the rest from 2000 to 2017. Algeria stops in 2022 and Lebanon in 2023 - Three lines: no partner in this list yet; the student brings the other side (fieldwork, or a file they find and check) - Plans (line 3): Portugal's fire and forest reforms after the fires of 2017; France's law of 10 July 2023 on the risk of wildfire; rescEU, the EU's reserve of firefighting planes and helicopters - Traps: The five biggest columns are text; Burnt area means different land in different countries; Three fire counts for 2024 are wrong in the file; Countries join in different years; More fires can mean better counting; Years run down and countries across; Each report can change the past; No UK, Ireland or Belgium - Checked: 2026-09-28 ### Burnt area mapped from satellites in each country around Europe and the Mediterranean, every year since 2006 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#effis-satellite-estimates - Download page: https://forest-fire.emergency.copernicus.eu/apps/effis.statistics/estimates - Publisher: The European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), run by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre for the Copernicus Emergency Management Service. Place: Europe. Issues: Land and forests, Air quality. Licence: CC BY 4.0, under the EFFIS data licence. Credit EFFIS and the Copernicus Emergency Management Service, and give the date you downloaded, because the current year changes every day. - One row: One country in one year: the hectares inside the burnt areas that EFFIS mapped from satellite images, and how many burnt areas it mapped. - Covers: 65 countries and territories in the EU, the rest of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, 2006 to 2026. 2026 is the season so far. 15 of them show no burnt area in any year - Three lines: no partner in this list yet; the student brings the other side (fieldwork, or a file they find and check) - Plans (line 3): Portugal's fire and forest reforms after the fires of 2017; France's law of 10 July 2023 on the risk of wildfire - Traps: The last year is not finished; The method changed in 2018; Every burnt patch counts; Not the same as what countries report; The file does not say which country it is; A zero is not always no fire; The CSV is inside a menu - Checked: 2026-09-28 ### Cattle in each Brazilian state, every year since 1974 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#ibge-cattle-herd - Download page: https://sidra.ibge.gov.br/tabela/3939 - Publisher: IBGE, Brazil's national statistics office (Pesquisa da Pecuária Municipal, table 3939 in SIDRA). Place: Brazil. Issues: Food and farming, Land and forests. Licence: No licence is stated on the page. IBGE publishes it openly: cite it as IBGE, Pesquisa da Pecuária Municipal, SIDRA table 3939, with the date you downloaded it. - One row: One state in one year: the number of cattle on 31 December. - Covers: 27 states (26 and the Federal District), 1974 to 2024, with 2024 preliminary. Brazil's herd was 176,388,726 in 2001 and 238,620,910 in 2023 - Three lines: ready; pairs with Tree cover lost in every country, state and province, every year since 2001 - Questions on the three lines: Across Brazil's 27 states, is the growth of the cattle herd from 2001 to 2023 related to the share of tree cover each state lost? - Plans (line 3): The 2009 cattle agreements: the TAC da Carne and the G4 agreement; Brazil's action plan against deforestation in the Legal Amazon (PPCDAm) - Traps: The state name appears once; The number has no heading; Use a browser; 2024 is preliminary; "..." means not available; Counted on 31 December; A cow is not a hectare - Checked: 2026-09-26 ### Protected land in every country, as a share of its land, every year since 2013 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#wb-protected-land - Download page: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/ER.LND.PTLD.ZS - Publisher: The World Bank (World Development Indicators, ER.LND.PTLD.ZS), from UNEP-WCMC's World Database on Protected Areas. Place: Global. Issues: Biodiversity, Land and forests. Licence: The World Bank's open data terms (CC BY 4.0 for the World Development Indicators). Cite the World Bank and Protected Planet (UNEP-WCMC and IUCN), with the date you downloaded it. - One row: One country in one year: land in protected areas and other conserved areas, as a percentage of its total land area. - Covers: 213 countries with values, 2013 to 2025, among 265 rows that include 47 aggregates such as World and Low income. 209 countries have a value for 2015 - Three lines: ready; pairs with Tree cover lost in every country, state and province, every year since 2001 - Questions on the three lines: Across the countries with at least 1 million hectares of tree cover, does protecting more land in 2015 go with losing less tree cover from 2016 to 2025? - Plans (line 3): The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, Target 3 (30 by 30); Aichi Biodiversity Target 11 - Traps: Four lines of notes sit above the header; Aggregates sit among the countries; Years run across; Values jump when the database changes; Protected is not managed - Checked: 2026-09-26 ### Average rainfall in every country, in millimetres a year - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#wb-average-rainfall - Download page: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.PRCP.MM - Publisher: The World Bank (World Development Indicators, AG.LND.PRCP.MM), from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Place: Global. Issues: Climate and weather, Rivers and lakes. Licence: The World Bank's open data terms (CC BY 4.0 for the World Development Indicators). Cite the World Bank and FAO, with the date you downloaded it. - One row: One country: its long-term average rainfall in millimetres a year, copied into every year's column. - Covers: 182 countries, from Egypt's 18 mm to Colombia's 3,240 mm, in the columns for 1961 to 2022 - Three lines: ready (the pair is inside the file) - Questions on the three lines: Is the relationship between protected land and tree cover loss the same in dry countries as in wet ones? Rainfall is the weather, so it is neither of the three lines: split the countries at a rainfall you fix before you look, then test each group (the starter investigation). - Plans (line 3): The UN Convention to Combat Desertification; Sustainable Development Goal 6, target 6.4: water-use efficiency and water stress - Traps: A long-term average, not the year's rain; One number for a whole country; Four lines of notes sit above the header; Aggregates sit among the countries; Years run across; It stops in 2022 - Checked: 2026-09-26 ### Farming's share of the fresh water each country withdraws - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#wb-farm-water-share - Download page: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/ER.H2O.FWAG.ZS - Publisher: The World Bank (World Development Indicators, ER.H2O.FWAG.ZS), from FAO's AQUASTAT. Place: Global. Issues: Food and farming, Rivers and lakes. Licence: The World Bank's open data terms (CC BY 4.0 for the World Development Indicators). Cite the World Bank and FAO AQUASTAT, with the date you downloaded it. - One row: One country in one year: water withdrawn for irrigation and livestock, as a percentage of all the fresh water it withdraws. - Covers: 180 countries, most from the early 1990s to 2022. In 2019, from Switzerland's 9.3% to India's 90.4% - Three lines: ready (the pair is inside the file) - Questions on the three lines: Is the relationship between protected land and tree cover loss different where farming takes most of a country's freshwater? Farming's share is what people do, but nothing natural at country scale here is what it acts on, so use it as a control: split the countries at a share you fix before you look (the starter investigation). - Plans (line 3): Sustainable Development Goal 6, target 6.4: water-use efficiency and water stress - Traps: Four impossible values; The status letters are gone; A share is not a volume; Four lines of notes sit above the header; Aggregates sit among the countries; Years run across - Checked: 2026-09-26 ### GDP per person in every country, every year since 1990, at 2021 prices - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#wb-gdp-per-person - Download page: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.KD - Publisher: The World Bank (World Development Indicators, NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.KD), from national accounts and the International Comparison Program's price surveys. Place: Global. Issues: People and development, Land and forests, Biodiversity. Licence: The World Bank's open data terms (CC BY 4.0 for the World Development Indicators). Cite the World Bank and the International Comparison Program, with the date you downloaded it and the Last Updated Date on the file's third line. - One row: One country in one year: the value of everything produced there (its GDP), divided by the number of people who live there, in international dollars at 2021 prices. - Covers: 199 countries with values, 1990 to 2025, among 265 rows that include 47 aggregates such as World and Low income. In 2015, from Burundi's $992 to Luxembourg's $130,097 a person - Three lines: ready; pairs with Sharks caught in the Atlantic by every fishing nation since 1950, and the ban on landing makos; Tree cover lost in every country, state and province, every year since 2001 - Questions on the three lines: Across the countries with at least 1 million hectares of tree cover, is GDP per person in 2015 related to the share of tree cover lost from 2016 to 2025? (Tree cover loss.) - Plans (line 3): Sustainable Development Goal 8, targets 8.1 and 8.4: growth per person, decoupled from environmental degradation - Traps: Four lines of notes sit above the header; Aggregates sit among the countries; Years run across; Values from 1990 to 2025 only; 18 countries have no value in any year; International dollars at 2021 prices; Values change from one release to the next, old years too; What is produced, not what people earn; An average, and it may trend; The environmental Kuznets curve is an idea, not a plan - Checked: 2026-09-27 ### Zooplankton and water quality in Lake Geneva, 1959 to 2018 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#french3lakes - Download page: https://entrepot.recherche.data.gouv.fr/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.57745/VNYZ9A - Publisher: INRAE Observatory on LAkes (OLA), Thonon-les-Bains, through Recherche Data Gouv (the French3lakes dataset). Place: Geneva. Issues: Rivers and lakes, Biodiversity, Water pollution. Licence: Etalab Open Licence 2.0: free to reuse with credit. Cite French3lakes, Freshwater zooplankton community composition data from French Peri-Alpine lakes, Recherche Data Gouv, doi:10.57745/VNYZ9A, and the date you downloaded it. - One row: One kind of zooplankton at one stage of its life on one sampling date at SHL2, the deepest point of the lake: its density in the top 50 m, in individuals per litre. The chemistry sheet is one measurement on one date. - Covers: Lake Geneva: zooplankton on 973 dates from 1959 to 2018, and total phosphorus, water temperature, transparency and chlorophyll from 1974 to 2015. Lakes Annecy and Bourget are in the same file - Three lines: ready; pairs with Fish caught in Lake Geneva's Swiss waters, every year since 1904 - Questions on the three lines: Is the annual mean density of Daphnia related to annual mean total phosphorus in Lake Geneva, 1974 to 2015? - Plans (line 3): CIPEL's action plans for the lake; Switzerland's ban on phosphates in laundry detergents - Traps: Choose Original File Format; Three lakes in one file; The headings are on row 2; One row per stage, under several names; No row means none counted; Two nets; Uneven sampling; Chemistry is its own sheet; Not the same unit as the monthly plankton card - Checked: 2026-09-26 ### Fish caught in Lake Geneva's Swiss waters, every year since 1904 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#fischereistatistik-leman - Download page: https://www.fischereistatistik.ch/fr/statistics - Publisher: Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN), Swiss federal fishing statistics, from the cantons of Vaud, Valais and Geneva. Place: Geneva. Issues: Biodiversity, Rivers and lakes, Food and farming. Licence: No licence is stated on the page. Cite FOEN, Statistique fédérale de la pêche (fischereistatistik.ch), with the lake, fishery, species and unit you chose and the date you downloaded it. - One row: One year: the catch of one species in Lake Geneva's Swiss waters by one kind of fishing, as tonnes or as a number of fish. - Covers: 1904 to 2024 for professional fishing, with 1911 to 1920 recorded as 0; recreational fishing from 1994 - Three lines: ready; pairs with Zooplankton and water quality in Lake Geneva, 1959 to 2018 - Questions on the three lines: Is the professional whitefish catch in Lake Geneva's Swiss waters related to the lake's total phosphorus, 1974 to 2015? | Is the professional perch catch related to total phosphorus in Lake Geneva, 1974 to 2015? - Plans (line 3): The Franco-Swiss agreement on fishing in Lake Geneva; CIPEL's action plans for the lake - Traps: Swiss waters only; 1911 to 1920 read 0; Use the professional series for anything long; The file does not say what it is; A catch is not a population; Use a browser - Checked: 2026-09-26 ### Kelp forest surveys off California, inside and outside marine reserves, every year since 1999 - Card: https://ess.alltheway.ing/datasets#pisco-kelp-forest - Download page: https://search.dataone.org/view/doi:10.6085/AA/PISCO_kelpforest.1.11 - Publisher: PISCO, the Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans (UC Santa Barbara and UC Santa Cruz), published on DataONE. Place: United States. Issues: Biodiversity, Food and farming. Licence: CC BY 4.0. Cite it as the package page shows, with its DOI (10.6085/AA/PISCO_kelpforest.1.11). The authors also ask users to tell them how the data is being used, through a form linked on the page. - One row: One transect on one day: the number of one species counted on a strip of reef 30 m long and 2 m wide (60 m²), at one site, in one depth zone. The site table adds each site's position and whether it is inside a marine protected area. - Covers: Kelp forest sites from Oregon to southern California, 1999 to 2024. The northern Channel Islands alone have 80 site codes and 5,253 transects - Three lines: ready (the pair is inside the file) - Questions on the three lines: In the northern Channel Islands, did purple urchin density differ between kelp forest sites inside and outside no-take reserves before (2010 to 2012) and after (2014 to 2024) sea star wasting disease removed the sunflower star? | Are red urchins, which are fished, denser at kelp forest sites inside the Channel Islands reserves than at sites outside them? - Plans (line 3): The Channel Islands marine reserve network - Traps: A species that was not seen has no row; Group by site_status, never by MPA_Name; Two halves of one place can sit either side of a boundary; A conservation area is not a reserve; The site table has many rows per site; 2013 is thin; Giant kelp comes in several rows per transect; The package is updated - Checked: 2026-09-26 ## Portals (14) Places to search for more. Not datasets: whatever is found there still has to pass the four tests. ### opendata.swiss, the federal open data portal - Link: https://opendata.swiss/en/dataset - Place: Switzerland. Issues: Many topics - How: A catalogue to search; most entries offer CSV - Everything the Confederation, the cantons and the communes publish, in one searchable place, including all the Geneva water datasets above. Search by keyword and filter the format to CSV, or you will spend the morning opening map layers. - Checked: 2026-09-10 ### River discharge and lake levels - Link: https://www.hydrodaten.admin.ch/ - Place: Switzerland. Issues: Rivers and lakes, Climate and weather - How: ⚠️ Recent data self-service; long historical series must be ordered on a form - Discharge, water level and water temperature at gauging stations across Switzerland, including the Rhône and the lake itself. Excellent data, but with an access problem: anything older than the recent period has to be requested, which is free but not immediate, so check before you build a question on it. - Checked: 2026-09-10 ### EnviDat, the Swiss environmental research data portal - Link: https://www.envidat.ch/ - Place: The Alps. Issues: Many topics, Ice and snow, Land and forests - How: A catalogue of research datasets; formats vary - Snow, forest, avalanche and landscape datasets published by WSL and SLF researchers. Research-grade rather than official statistics, so read the documentation first, and the reward is data nobody else in your class will have. - Checked: 2026-09-10 ### Hub'Eau, France's water data as web addresses - Link: https://hubeau.eaufrance.fr/page/apis - Place: France. Issues: Rivers and lakes, Water pollution, Biodiversity - How: Free web addresses that return CSV directly, no account; each address gives at most 20,000 rows - Thirteen APIs for the whole of France: river chemistry (289 million analyses at 25,613 stations), river biology, flow, water temperature, fish, and pesticide sales. The Haute-Savoie cards show how to build the address; change the département code to study your own region. - Checked: 2026-09-27 ### data.gouv.fr, the French open data portal - Link: https://www.data.gouv.fr/ - Place: France. Issues: Many topics - How: A catalogue to search; most entries offer CSV - The French equivalent of opendata.swiss, and the place to find départemental and communal data for the areas across the border. Useful when a Geneva question needs its French half. - Checked: 2026-09-10 ### Air quality across the border, in Haute-Savoie and Ain - Link: https://data-atmoaura.opendata.arcgis.com/ - Place: France. Issues: Air quality - How: A catalogue of 186 datasets; the useful ones carry CSV and GeoJSON - The French half of a Geneva air question: particulates, nitrogen dioxide and ozone for the départements the canton shares a border with. Filter by format first, because a fair share of the catalogue is modelled annual map layers with no table behind them, and what you want is the measurement series. - Checked: 2026-09-15 ### European air quality, station by station - Link: https://eeadmz1-downloads-webapp.azurewebsites.net/ - Place: Europe. Issues: Air quality - How: A download service; choose country, pollutant and years, get CSV - Measured concentrations from monitoring stations across Europe, with the historical archive alongside recent years. Comparing cities means thinking hard about what else differs between them, which is exactly the controlling work sprint 4 asks for. - Checked: 2026-09-10 ### The EEA data hub - Link: https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/datahub - Place: Europe. Issues: Many topics, Water pollution, Land and forests - How: A catalogue of European environmental datasets - Bathing water quality, land cover, emissions, waste and protected areas, compiled to a common standard across member states. It gives you the same definitions in every country, which most global datasets cannot promise. - Checked: 2026-09-10 ### Water quality sampling across England - Link: https://environment.data.gov.uk/water-quality/downloads - Place: United Kingdom. Issues: Water pollution, Rivers and lakes - How: ⚠️ Choose an area, a type and a year; the whole-of-England file is too big to open - Laboratory results from samples taken at sampling points across England since 2000, tens of millions of them, which makes this the nearest thing here to the counted Geneva river files. Two catches: older guides link to environment.data.gov.uk/water-quality/view/..., which now returns a 404, and the area has to be narrowed before the file is small enough for a spreadsheet. - Checked: 2026-09-15 ### US commercial fish and shellfish landings, by state and species - Link: https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/foss - Place: United States. Issues: Biodiversity, Food and farming - How: Query form with CSV download, no account; 1950 to 2024 - Pounds and dollars landed each year, for every coastal state and hundreds of species, from Maine lobster to Alaska pollock. The Gulf shrimp are counted on their own card; for anything else, check the species name and the Confidentiality column before you rely on it. - Checked: 2026-09-27 ### Our World in Data - Link: https://ourworldindata.org/ - Place: Global. Issues: Energy and emissions, Food and farming, Land and forests, People and development - How: Direct CSV for any chart, no account - Energy, emissions, food, land use and biodiversity, compiled from original sources into long comparable series that you cite alongside the original. Add .csv to any chart's URL and the whole series downloads, so your extraction is one line long. But check the entity column before you average anything: World, Africa and High-income countries sit in it beside the countries. - Checked: 2026-09-10 ### World Bank Open Data - Link: https://data.worldbank.org/ - Place: Global. Issues: People and development, Rivers and lakes, Land and forests - How: Direct CSV or Excel per indicator, all countries and years - Environmental and socio-economic indicators for every country; GDP per person, protected land, rainfall and farming's share of water are counted on their own cards. One indicator is one file, countries down and years across: reshape it to one row per country-year, and take out World, the EU and the income groups. - Checked: 2026-09-27 ### FAOSTAT - Link: https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data - Place: Global. Issues: Food and farming, Energy and emissions, Land and forests - How: Bulk downloads and a query builder, both giving CSV - Food production, livestock, fertiliser and pesticide use, and agricultural emissions, country by country and year by year. Fertiliser application per hectare against water quality is a classic ESS pairing that this file makes possible. - Checked: 2026-09-10 ### GBIF, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility - Link: https://www.gbif.org/ - Place: Global. Issues: Biodiversity - How: Filtered downloads with a citable DOI for every one; a free GBIF account is needed to download - Occurrence records with coordinates and dates for almost anything alive, pooled from museums, surveys and citizen science: about 418,000 for the European beaver, 167,000 of them in Switzerland alone, and 27,000 for the sea otter. Records show where people looked rather than where a species is, so abundance needs care, and every download carries its own DOI to cite. - Checked: 2026-09-10