A DIFFERENT WAY TO SEE LAND

Your land.
Our world.

Outline a piece of land. Compare its share of the country’s area and night lights. Explore your equal share.

Find your land

Jump to a country or territory

Have coordinates?

Outline the boundary

Zoom to your plot, choose Draw boundary, then click each corner. Click the first dot to close it.

Drag dots to adjust them while drawing. Use the building’s land footprint, not the floor area of an apartment.

Your place in the world

ESTIMATE

A few dots. A new perspective.

Close your boundary to reveal the numbers.

How this estimate works

We calculate the drawn polygon’s surface area on a sphere, then split it at country and territory boundaries. Each percentage is the area inside that country divided by that country’s mapped area. Your share divides both figures by the total number of people.

Country outlines come from Natural Earth 1:10m, v5.1.2. These generalized boundaries can be kilometres from a real border or coast. Small islands may be missing. Territories are listed separately where the dataset does so; disputed borders follow its default view.

Country areas are calculated from the same polygons, including inland water where mapped, rather than official statistical land areas. This is an educational comparison, not proof of ownership or a survey.

Land area is not land value. A Georgist tax calculation would also need land rental values and a tax policy. Night-light brightness adds a simple desirability proxy, not a tax bill.

Linear night-light estimate. For each country, we sum pixel brightness × the pixel area inside its boundary. For your plot we use the same rule, clipping pixels at your boundary and at country borders. Your percentage is the plot’s light score divided by the country’s light score × 100. Equivalently: average plot brightness × plot area ÷ national light score. Your personal share divides this percentage by the number of people.

Brightness comes from NASA’s 2016 Black Marble grayscale map, 3 km edition. We use its 0–255 image brightness linearly, with partial pixels weighted by area. This published image is display-processed, so the score is not a percentage of physical light emissions or calibrated radiance. There is no extra distance-based halo around the plot. A country with zero mapped light has no defined light percentage.

The night-light dataset stays on the server. Your finished boundary is sent over HTTPS to calculate the result; the sharing count stays in your browser. Boundary coordinates are not written to logs or disk. A hash and calculated results may be cached in memory for five minutes. OpenStreetMap receives requests for the map areas you view. No analytics or account is required.

Map tiles are supplied by OpenStreetMap’s community service, with no availability guarantee. Report a map issue. Data & software credits.

Find your land, then draw its boundary.