BGC and Map of Life are delighted to announce the official release of the Spatiotemporal Observation Annotation Tool (STOAT)! STOAT is a platform that allows users to quickly and easily retrieve values from environmental layers associated with species occurrences. STOAT provides convenient access to global datasets such as MODIS, Landsat, and CHELSA at native resolution, and conducts all annotations in the cloud, saving users effort and computation time. User-specified spatial and temporal buffers enable scale-conscious annotations, and facilitate the further exploration of scaling relationships in ecology.

Access to STOAT is provided through both a web interface (https://mol.org/stoat), and an R package (rstoat). Further information about STOAT and its use can be found at (https://mol.org/stoat/about). An academic publication which describes STOAT’s methods in detail is in review, titled: “A cloud-based toolbox for the versatile environmental annotation of biodiversity data.” BGC would like to thank NASA for supporting the development of STOAT through their AIST program, and STOAT’s team of developers and collaborators.

Read the paper in PLOS Biology here: plos.io/3qDtRlX

To cite STOAT, use the following citation:

Li R, Ranipeta A, Wilshire J, Malczyk J, Duong M, Guralnick R, et al. (2021) A cloud-based toolbox for the versatile environmental annotation of biodiversity data. PLoS Biol 19(11): e3001460. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001460

‍