The GEO Mountains General Inventory is a free online resource that seeks to provide comprehensive metadata related to open datasets and data portals that may be useful for applications in mountain areas. Following the release of v1 in March 2022, v1.4 is now out!

Discovering potentially useful mountain datasets and other resources is often a time-consuming and frustrating task that requires speculative web searches or trawling through the vast array of data portals that have proliferated. Alternatively, institutional or legacy knowledge may have to be relied upon. These difficulties take researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers away from their core tasks, and may mean that the most suitable and/or latest datasets for a given application are not consistently used.

With a view to helping alleviate some of these problems, the GEO Mountains General Inventory seeks to provide comprehensive metadata related to open datasets and data portals that may be useful in the context of mountainous applications, plus the corresponding web links. The Inventory is primarily focused on remotely sensed and modelled datasets spanning multiple disciplines, but also includes a variety of open-source software, model codes, and tools that may be useful. Both regionally-specific and global resources are included. 

What is new in v1.4?

• New entries have been added; the inventory now includes 642 records. 
• The classification has been updated / verified; each record is now associated with one or more of possible 8 themes (atmosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, economic sectors, society & governance, and natural hazards).
• A new field, "Mountain Focus", has been added; this enables rapid distinction to be made between resources that specifically pertain to mountain regions and more general / global resources which may nevertheless be useful for some applications in mountains. 

Figures 1 and 2 show the distribution of records in the inventory by theme and continent, respectively. Figure 3, meanwhile, shows the proportion of mountain-specific vs. general / global resources. Figures are indicative to give a general idea of the general inventory's distribution.

The next release, v2, is being planned to coincide with the release of the new GEO Mountains website. For this release, we will focus on improving the presentation of the inventory and associated interactive functionality (e.g. via dynamic web tables). 

Contributions to the inventory are still very welcome! Please suggest any datasets, data portals, and other resources (e.g., software, tools) that you feel may be useful to the global mountain community.

The General Inventory complements the GEO Mountains Inventory of In Situ Observational Infrastructure, which compiles information regarding multi-disciplinary ground monitoring in the mountains of the world.

Explore the GEO Mountains General Inventory. 

 Cover image by Brady Bellini.