But cut ecologists some slack. The places they study, like alpine prairies, peat bogs, or oases, are the diametric opposite of controlled lab settings. So how do you bring hard data to the study of life on our soft planet? A new map.

The Global Ecological Land Unit map is the most detailed look ever at Earth's ecosystems. Basically, it partitions the planet into squares 250 meters on a side—roughly the size of a couple of football fields. An ecosystem looks at lithology (that's rocks and dirt), climate, topography, and land cover—from pristine forest to pavement. Each square on the map combines those categories of data, and every pixel can be described in a single sentence—say, warm, wet hills on volcanic rocks with mostly evergreen forests. Underneath: reams of reference. A world's worth of data.