FAIR² DATA DIRECT SUBMISSION article
Front. Environ. Sci.
Sec. Environmental Informatics and Remote Sensing
Atoll biodiversity and environments: an AI-ready, interactive data portal for Indo-Pacific atolls
Provisionally accepted
- 1Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Leiden, Netherlands
- 2The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
- 3The Nature Conservancy, Brunswick, United States
- 4University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, United States
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This data article accompanies the release of an interactive, AI-ready data portal that harmonizes information on biodiversity and environments for Indo-Pacific atolls. The data portal collates species inventories using best available data for six terrestrial guilds alongside estimated seabird population sizes, and integrates biogeographic descriptors, land and reef habitat classifications, oceanographic variables, climate metrics, human population data, and information on historical military use. In total, the different data layers provide information for all 310 Indo-Pacific atolls with permanent, emergent landforms, and comprise 90 standardized variables and 4,215 species records digitized from 677 literature sources, with species catalogues linked to GBIF, BOLD, and NCBI databases via unique taxon identifiers. The portal adheres to FAIR² principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable, AI-readiness, Responsible AI) to support reproducible biodiversity and environmental analyses and machine-learning workflows.
Keywords: atoll, coral reef, Dataset, Human footprint, Island, land use, remote sensing, Species catalogue
Received: 13 Oct 2025; Accepted: 19 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Steibl, Burnett, Holmes, Wegmann and Russell. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Sebastian Steibl
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.