Methodology

Sourcing

Every entry rests on a named source: a journal article, a preprint, an institution, a museum, a government body, a database or a book. We write our own text from it — we never reproduce someone else’s article. The source is listed on the entry with a link, so you can check the claim rather than take it from us. Entries frequently carry several sources; where one is the specific document behind a figure, it comes first.

Credibility marks

Each entry says how well supported it is, and the mark is shown rather than implied:

• Peer-reviewed — the claim rests on a peer-reviewed publication.
• Corroborated — independently confirmed by more than one source.
• Reported — reported by a credible source, not independently confirmed.
• Disputed — the evidence is contested, and we say by whom.
• Myth — widely repeated and not true. We keep these because the correction is the point.

Numbers

A statistic is stored with its unit, the period it covers, whether it is a measurement or an estimate, a confidence level and a methodology note. That is why a figure here is dated rather than live: a snapshot you can compare with the next measurement is more useful than a counter you cannot audit. Where a number is a model output, the entry says so instead of presenting it as a count.

Translation

Entries are written in Polish first and translated by a person, not published automatically. A section appears in English only once its content has been translated and approved, which is why the English edition can hold fewer entries in a section than the Polish one.

Some material is deliberately not shown here rather than shown in the wrong language. Where a field has no English version, the block is omitted — an English heading over a Polish paragraph would be worse than a shorter page. Image credits are the exception and always remain, because reusing a photograph without its credit would breach its licence.

Names keep their own spelling: Białowieża, Šumava, Dzūkija, Ötzi. Local legal and culinary terms stay in the original — allemansrätten, jokaisenoikeudet, smaženice — because that is what you would search for.

Limits

• These are editorial summaries, not systematic reviews. A source we did not find is a source we did not weigh.
• Rules on picking change. Country pages carry the date we checked them; treat anything older as a starting point, not an answer.
• Newly described species are reported as their describing authors state them; a 2026 description has not yet been tested by time.
• Species observation data, and the maps built from it, are Polish-only and documented in the Polish methodology.

Found an error, or a source we should have read? Tell us.