About Chronos Terra

Conservation of land, skill and knowledge

Chronos Terra is an archive of things that are being lost: the calls of threatened species, the layers beneath a pinewood, the words for a landscape, the skills that shaped it, and the marks people left on it. It places each record on a globe and on a single timeline that runs from the deep past to the present, so that a fossil, a soil sample, a recording and a place-name can be seen as one story.

What is in the archive

Six vaults hold six kinds of record. Every record carries an evidence tier, a source and a licence, and every location is shown only as precisely as it is safe to show it.

• Palaeo vault. Fossil specimens, trace fossils and clearly labelled reconstructions.
• Endangered life vault. Recordings and observations of species at the edge.
• Edaphic vault. Soil, roots and sediment from one illustrative pinewood site, with depth.
• Language vault. Endangered languages, place-names, songs and reconstructed speech.
• Intangible skill vault. Crafts and practices recorded from consenting practitioners.
• Iconography vault. Carvings, engravings and motifs that carry memory.

A registry, not just a website

Every published record is entered in the public record registry under a persistent identifier of the form CTF-VAULT-000000. Registration means the record has passed validation, its location has been generalised to a safe precision, and the published files have been audited. Each entry carries a content version so a citation can name what it relied on, and the whole registry is available as JSON and CSV.

Who it is for

Teachers, researchers, community groups, funders and anyone curious about how a place came to be the way it is. The map can be explored freely, followed as a guided journey, or read as a plain list.

Status

This is the minimum viable product: a static site built from validated data files with about eighty records. Accounts, a database, community contribution and live sensors are on the roadmap.