Provenance
Where this map comes from
Bivaq is assembled from open data and the people who sleep out. Every source is named here, and every photo names its author next to the photo itself.
The places
Shelters, water sources and trails come from four places. Where a place came from is shown on its own page.
OpenStreetMap
ODbLThe backbone: most of the 14,000 shelters and every water source started as an OSM node. Contributors worldwide keep it current.
refuges.info
CC BY-SA 2.0Community-maintained shelter directory for the French Alps and Pyrenees. French shelters carry a cross-link to their refuges.info record (the id comes with the OpenStreetMap data); on a small set of Italian huts it also contributed hut details — stove, bedding, capacity, water — credited under its licence.
The Bivaq community
ContributedPlaces added, corrected and confirmed by people who were actually there. The condition reports are theirs too.
Bivaq curation
Checked by handWhere the open data was thin or wrong, we checked it ourselves and marked it verified.
The map on your screen
Tiles, imagery, weather and elevation come from these providers. Each is credited on the map itself where it appears.
OpenFreeMap
OSM data · ODbLHosts the default map tiles, rendered from OpenStreetMap data.
OpenTopoMap
CC BY-SAThe topographic tiles that are the hiking base map.
Waymarked Trails
CC BY-SA · OSM data ODbLThe Marked paths layer — waymarked hiking routes from OpenStreetMap, drawn as context over whichever base map you are using. Off until you switch it on, and credited on the map while it is.
Mapbox + Maxar
Proprietary imagerySatellite imagery, where the satellite layer is offered. Credited on the map when active.
Open-Meteo
Open dataThe weather forecasts on the map and shelter pages. Credited on the map.
Copernicus DEM (GLO-30)
EU / ESA / AirbusSatellite terrain data — used to fill in shelter elevations where the source data had none, to draw the terrain contours behind the shelters home, and the shaded-relief hillshade behind the trail corridor on the home page. Display-grade, marked as derived.
Natural Earth
Public domainPublic-domain shaded-relief raster — the faint low-zoom terrain texture beneath the interactive map (part of OpenFreeMap's liberty base style), desaturated into the brand palette. Relief only: no borders, labels or city points.
The photos
Most shelters have no photo, so we look for one on Wikimedia Commons. We are strict about it, because a photo of the wrong hut is worse than no photo at all.
- We link, we don't re-host
- Commons photos are served from Wikimedia, never copied onto our servers. If a photo is removed there, it disappears from here too — which is exactly what should happen.
- Only licences that allow commercial reuse
- Public domain, CC0, CC BY and CC BY-SA. Anything non-commercial, no-derivatives, all-rights-reserved, or with an unclear licence is rejected. If in doubt, we reject.
- Every photo names its author
- Author, licence and a link to the file page on Commons, wherever the photo appears. If we can't work out who took a photo, we don't use it.
- A photo has to be certain, not just close
- We match on Wikidata's curated image for a place, or on a photo that is both near it and named for it. Anything less confident is held back for review rather than shown.
- Mountain ranges are photographed too
- Each range shows a photo matched to its Wikidata item by name — the range's classified as a mountain range, massif or protected area, never guessed from a coordinate — under the same licences. Author, licence and the Commons file link are on every country's mountain-ranges page.
Something wrong?
Report a photo from the shelter it's on and we'll take it down. For the place itself — a wrong name, a hut that no longer exists — fix it at the source and it reaches everyone, not just us.