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 the sources below. Where a place came from is shown on its own page.
OpenStreetMap
ODbLThe backbone: most of the 33 206 shelters and every water source started as an OSM node, and the trail lines and region boundaries come from it too. 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.
LIPAS
CC BY 4.0Finland's national register of sports and outdoor facilities, kept by the University of Jyväskylä with municipalities and Metsähallitus. Finnish lean-tos, kotas and wilderness huts that OpenStreetMap does not have come from here; places the register marks as not open to the public, or not to be shown on outdoor maps, are left out.
The Bivaq community
ContributedPlaces added and corrected by visitors, and the condition reports they file. A report says what one visitor saw, and on what day.
Bivaq curation
Checked by handWhere the open data was thin or wrong, we checked it by hand. The place page says so: “Checked by Bivaq”.
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, for signed-in users (signing in is free). 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 elevation profiles of the trails, the contour texture behind the site (the Kamnik–Savinja Alps around Bivak pod Skuto, at 150 m intervals), and the shaded-relief terrain on the map and 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.
- The owner's photographs are a different thing
- The photographs on the home page, the About and Trails pages and the guides are the owner's own — Bivak pod Skuto in the Kamnik Alps, Skåpet in Norway, the Malá Fatra ridge and other places he slept — and the drawings in the guides were made for Bivaq. They are self-hosted and all rights reserved, which the rules above would reject: those rules govern photos from Commons, where we are re-publishing someone else's work and a licence is the only thing that makes that legal. These are taken from no one, and there is no third party to credit or to take them down. They are never altered — only resized. Photographs © Pavol Milý.
- Photos uploaded to Bivaq
- Some places carry photos that visitors, or the owner, took there and uploaded here. They stay their author's: under the terms, whoever uploads one licenses Bivaq to show it on the place, and a photo that came from a named source carries that source's credit. Every upload is re-encoded in the browser first, so no location or camera data is stored with 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 ranges-and-areas 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.