Open Questions

Open Deep Sea

Why It Is Open Published figures for the total area of the deep ocean floor vary by more than 10 percent depending on the depth-contour definition used (commonly 200m) and the underlying bathymetric data set, ranging from roughly 300 to 335 million square kilometers in different sources; NOAA itself states the extent only as a share of the ocean (over 90 percent of the ocean is deep ocean) rather than a single agreed area figure, and less than 0.001 percent of the deep seafloor has ever been directly observed, which is part of why no more precise consensus figure exists.

What Would Settle It A single, standardized global bathymetric survey below the 200m contour, using one consistent methodology, of the kind not yet completed as of this writing (Seabed 2030 and similar mapping initiatives are working toward this but are not yet complete).

Expertise Needed Oceanography and bathymetric mapping

Question posed in How Much of the Ocean Has Been Explored? (NOAA Ocean Exploration), Ocean fact: How much of the ocean has been explored?.

Open Wild Silk Moth

Why It Is Open The Wikipedia article on Bombyx mandarina, fetched live for this pass, carries no IUCN Red List conservation status; the species may be unassessed or assessed only in a specialist source not consulted here.

What Would Settle It An IUCN Red List entry, or a Lepidoptera-specific conservation assessment, naming a status for Bombyx mandarina.

Question posed in Bombyx mandarina (Wikipedia).

Open Moorland

Why It Is Open Wikipedia's own Moorland article states plainly that experts disagree on the exact distinction between heath and moorland: moor is generally described as highland, high-rainfall ground while heath is lowland and more often shaped by human activity, but the line is not sharp and both the Heath and Moorland articles describe each as closely related to the other with no agreed boundary.

What Would Settle It A published vegetation-classification standard drawing an explicit, measurable line between heath and moorland (by elevation, rainfall, peat depth or floristic composition) accepted across the ecological literature, rather than the regional and traditional usage the sources currently describe.

Question posed in Moorland (Wikipedia).

Open Earthworm

Why It Is Open Agricultural and ecological surveys count earthworm abundance locally, but no comprehensive census aggregates the roughly 7,000 known earthworm species across all soils worldwide, and population density varies enormously by soil type, moisture, and land use.

What Would Settle It A coordinated global soil biodiversity survey standardizing earthworm sampling methodology across biomes and land-use types.

Expertise Needed Soil ecology and edaphology

Question posed in Earthworm (Wikipedia), As an invasive species section, species count sentence.

Open Bird-of-paradise

Why It Is Open Population studies exist for some individual birds-of-paradise species, but the 44 species in the family are not tracked under one combined census, and several inhabit remote New Guinea forest interiors that have never been comprehensively surveyed.

What Would Settle It Species-by-species population surveys across the full range of Paradisaeidae, aggregated into one family-wide estimate.

Expertise Needed Ornithology and conservation biology

Question posed in Bird-of-paradise (Wikipedia), opening paragraph, family size sentence.

Open Rafflesia

Why It Is Open Rafflesia lives almost entirely as thread-like tissue hidden inside a host vine and only becomes visible when it briefly flowers, so no reliable method exists to count total individuals, only the flowers observed at any given time.

What Would Settle It Genetic sampling of host Tetrastigma vines to detect latent Rafflesia infections independent of flowering, combined with systematic habitat surveys.

Expertise Needed Conservation botany

Question posed in Rafflesia (Wikipedia), Description section, no-leaves-stems-roots sentence.

Open Stingray

Why It Is Open Fisheries and conservation bodies track catch and status data species by species, but no single stock assessment aggregates population across all roughly 220 stingray species and eleven families.

What Would Settle It Coordinated global elasmobranch population assessments combining fishery, bycatch, and habitat survey data across all stingray families.

Expertise Needed Marine biology and fisheries science

Question posed in Stingray (Wikipedia), opening paragraph, species count sentence.

Open Yellowjacket

Why It Is Open Yellowjacket colonies are annual and mostly die off each winter, with only mated queens overwintering to found new nests, so no comprehensive census tracks total colony or individual numbers across the many Vespula and Dolichovespula species and their ranges.

What Would Settle It Standardized trapping and nest-density surveys repeated across regions and seasons for every yellowjacket species.

Expertise Needed Entomology

Question posed in Yellowjacket (Wikipedia), Nesting section, one-season sentence.

Open Sphagnum

Why It Is Open Peatland mapping is incomplete in remote boreal and arctic regions, and existing global wetland inventories do not isolate the area or biomass specifically dominated by Sphagnum from other peat-forming vegetation.

What Would Settle It Satellite-based global peatland mapping cross-referenced with species-level vegetation surveys distinguishing Sphagnum-dominated bogs from other peatland types.

Expertise Needed Peatland ecology and remote sensing

Question posed in Sphagnum (Wikipedia), opening paragraph, species count sentence.

Open African Great Lakes

Why It Is Open Reference sources state the surface area of individual lakes (Victoria, Tanganyika, Malawi and others) but disagree on how many lakes belong to the African Great Lakes group itself, and no live source found states a single combined-area total for the group as such. This atlas's own cited Wikipedia article states the lakes' combined water volume ("Collectively, they contain 31,000 km3 (7,400 mi3) of water.") but gives no combined surface-area figure anywhere in the article.

What Would Settle It A single authoritative geographic or limnological source that both fixes which lakes belong to the African Great Lakes group and states a combined surface-area figure for exactly that membership.

Expertise Needed Physical geography / limnology

Question posed in African Great Lakes (Wikipedia), Wikipedia article body, states combined water volume, no combined-area figure anywhere in article.

Open Eurasian Steppe

Why It Is Open This atlas's own cited Wikipedia article describes the Eurasian Steppe by the countries it crosses and its west-east extent ("It stretches westward some 8000 kilometres (5000 miles) from Manchuria across Mongolia, Xinjiang, Kazakhstan, Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Romania and Hungary") but states no total-area figure anywhere. Public reference sources checked separately describe the steppe's boundary differently, especially where it grades into desert to the south and forest to the north, and the area figures given across those sources diverge by several million square kilometers depending on the boundary used; none of those figures is stored here because none was confirmed against its own raw source text at a specific, citable locator.

What Would Settle It A single authoritative biogeographic source that fixes the steppe's boundary (for example a named ecoregion or biome classification) and states the resulting total area for exactly that boundary.

Expertise Needed Physical geography / biogeography

Question posed in Eurasian Steppe (Wikipedia), Wikipedia article body, states an 8,000 km west-east extent and the countries crossed, no area figure given.

Open Pacific Northwest Temperate Rainforest

Why It Is Open This atlas's own cited Wikipedia article and the WWF classification both describe the Pacific temperate rainforest as the world's largest temperate rainforest, but the region is mapped as several separate ecoregions (Northern Pacific coastal forests, British Columbia mainland coastal forests, Central Pacific coastal forests, Klamath-Siskiyou forests and others), each carrying its own area figure in reference sources. No live source found states one combined total for the whole region, and summing the separate ecoregion figures ourselves would be this atlas's own calculation rather than an attested figure taken from a source.

What Would Settle It A single authoritative source (WWF or a peer-reviewed biogeography reference) that states one combined total area for the Pacific temperate rainforest as a single region, or that explicitly names which ecoregions such a total should sum.

Expertise Needed Physical geography / biogeography

Question posed in Pacific Temperate Rainforests (Wikipedia), Wikipedia article body describes region as world's largest temperate rainforest, gives no combined area total.

Open Baobab

Why It Is Open As of the cited source (Wikipedia, current to February 2025), the African baobab has not yet been classified by the IUCN Red List, even though there is evidence its populations may be declining. This atlas's conservation-status property is a closed enum of assessed categories (Least Concern through Critically Endangered, plus Data Deficient), and none of them honestly represents the simple absence of any assessment, so no property value was written.

What Would Settle It A future IUCN Red List assessment publishing a conservation-status category for Adansonia digitata, at which point the live category can be recorded directly on the species entity.

Expertise Needed Conservation biology, IUCN Species Survival Commission assessment

Question posed in Adansonia digitata (Wikipedia).

Open Common Raven

Why It Is Open The Wikipedia article consulted for this species gives no single global population figure; secondary web results cite conflicting uncited totals (roughly 16 million versus 29 million) with no raw source page fetched to confirm either.

What Would Settle It A dated global population estimate from a named, fetchable source (BirdLife International DataZone, Partners in Flight, or the IUCN Red List assessment page) with a verbatim figure this atlas can cite directly.

Expertise Needed Ornithology

Question posed in Common Raven (Wikipedia), Population section (absent).

Open Green Sea Turtle

Why It Is Open The Wikipedia article consulted states the IUCN reclassified the species from endangered to least concern in 2025 and that the population has risen about 28 percent since the 1970s, but gives no absolute global count of individuals or nesting females; regional nesting-female counts exist but no consolidated global total was found in the source consulted.

What Would Settle It A consolidated global population figure (total individuals or total nesting females) from the 2025 IUCN Red List assessment (Seminoff et al., article e.T4615A285108125) or an equivalent named, fetchable source.

Expertise Needed Marine biology

Question posed in Green Sea Turtle (Wikipedia), Population section (absent).

Open White Stork

Why It Is Open The Wikipedia article consulted gives only scattered national and regional breeding-pair counts (for example Poland, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria); a secondary web search found a BirdLife-attributed figure of roughly 700,000 individuals worldwide, but the BirdLife DataZone factsheet page itself is JavaScript-rendered and no raw verbatim figure could be fetched from it this pass.

What Would Settle It A verbatim global population figure fetched directly from the BirdLife DataZone factsheet, the European Red List of Birds PDF, or an equivalent named source this atlas can cite with a real locator and quote.

Expertise Needed Ornithology

Question posed in White Stork (Wikipedia), Population section (absent).

Open Heath

Why It Is Open Heath is a globally distributed shrubland habitat type occurring on every continent except Antarctica (Australia, southern Africa, Texas, New Caledonia, Chile, Mediterranean shores and elsewhere), not one bounded place, and this atlas's own cited Wikipedia article gives no single combined global area figure for it anywhere in the text, only qualitative statements that it is widespread and that many of its European stands are vanishing.

What Would Settle It A single authoritative global inventory of heath habitat extent across every continent where it occurs, using one consistent definition of what counts as heath as opposed to moorland or other shrubland.

Expertise Needed Physical geography / vegetation ecology

Question posed in Heath (Wikipedia), Wikipedia article body, describes heath as widespread across multiple continents, states no combined global area figure anywhere in the article.

Open Moorland

Why It Is Open Moorland occurs as a habitat type across tropical Africa, northern and western Europe and South America rather than as one bounded place; this atlas's own cited Wikipedia article states only that Great Britain holds an estimated 10 to 15 percent of the world's moors, a proportion that itself implies no global total is stated anywhere in the article, since the figure is given as a share rather than alongside an absolute worldwide total.

What Would Settle It A single authoritative global inventory of moorland extent across every region where it occurs, under one consistent definition distinguishing moorland from heath and from tundra.

Expertise Needed Physical geography / vegetation ecology

Question posed in Moorland (Wikipedia), Wikipedia article body, states Great Britain holds 10-15 percent of the world's moors, no combined global area figure anywhere in the article.

Open Sky Island

Why It Is Open Sky islands are isolated mountain ranges found across many disconnected regions worldwide (the Madrean Archipelago, East African and other ranges across the Afrotropical, Australasian, Indomalayan, Nearctic, Neotropical and Palearctic realms), each with its own extent; this atlas's own cited Wikipedia article lists numerous examples by realm and gives individual elevation figures but no aggregate area measurement anywhere in the text, since the concept describes a pattern of isolation rather than one bounded region.

What Would Settle It An authoritative global inventory listing every recognized sky island range with its own area, summed under one consistent definition of what counts as a sky island.

Expertise Needed Biogeography

Question posed in Sky Island (Wikipedia), Wikipedia article body, lists sky island examples by realm with individual elevations, states no aggregate area figure anywhere in the article.

Open Harpy Eagle

Why It Is Open The cited English language Wikipedia article on the harpy eagle (Harpia harpyja) gives no total population number or range anywhere in its text; a full-article search this pass found only regional decline and extirpation patterns, no comprehensive count.

What Would Settle It A dedicated IUCN Red List population assessment, or a peer reviewed range wide survey, stating a number of mature individuals or total adults for the species as a whole.

Expertise Needed conservation biology

Question posed in Harpy Eagle (Wikipedia), Population section, absent from article.