Quantarctica, an integrated mapping environment for Antarctica, the Southern Ocean, and sub-Antarctic islands

TLDR

Quantarctica is a geospatial data package, analysis environment, and visualization platform covering Antarctica, the Southern Ocean, and sub‑Antarctic islands. It runs offline on QGIS, bundles basemaps, satellite imagery, terrain models, and nine‑discipline scientific data, and offers color‑blind‑friendly cartography and dataset metadata with abstracts and source references. The platform enables users to view and analyze multiple Antarctic datasets together conveniently, lowering the entry barrier for field and research work.

Abstract

Quantarctica (https://www.npolar.no/quantarctica) is a geospatial data package, analysis environment, and visualization platform for the Antarctic Continent, Southern Ocean (>40oS), and sub-Antarctic islands. Quantarctica works with the free, cross-platform Geographical Information System (GIS) software QGIS and can run without an Internet connection, making it a viable tool for fieldwork in remote areas. The data package includes basemaps, satellite imagery, terrain models, and scientific data in nine disciplines, including physical and biological sciences, environmental management, and social science. To provide a clear and responsive user experience, cartography and rendering settings are carefully prepared using colour sets that work well for typical data combinations and with consideration of users with common colour vision deficiencies. Metadata included in each dataset provides brief abstracts for non-specialists and references to the original data sources. Thus, Quantarctica provides an integrated environment to view and analyse multiple Antarctic datasets together conveniently and with a low entry barrier.