The open data behind mineral.watch

Every number on this site traces back to a public source, and the compiled files are yours to reuse. This catalogue lists all of them: 110 commodity series mirrored from the British Geological Survey's World Mineral Statistics as plain JSON, the reference files that go with them, and the curated datasets behind each dashboard on minerals, oil & gas and the green transition.

Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 for the compilation — cite mineral.watch and the original publisher. Underlying statistics remain the property of their publishers (BGS © UKRI, USGS, IEA, EIA, OPEC and others).

Dashboard datasets

Each dashboard compiles production, reserves, trade, price and policy data from the primary sources it cites — USGS, BGS, UN Comtrade, the IEA, the EIA, OPEC, industry bodies and company disclosures. The BGS series that feed its maps are downloadable below; the rest is embedded in the page, cited and dated inline, and described in the page's schema.org Dataset record.

World mineral statistics, 1970–2024, as JSON

One file per commodity, mirrored from the BGS World Mineral Statistics database via the BGS OGC API Features service and reshaped for the Mineral Explorer and the mined-vs-refined map. Figures for a given country, commodity and year are summed across BGS sub-commodity breakdowns. Click a commodity to open it on the map.

P production · I imports · E exports. Country counts are the number of distinct ISO3 codes reporting at least one year. Sizes are uncompressed.

Reference files

• meta.json — the commodity index: BGS name, URL slug, statistics available, year range and the unit of each statistic.
• countries.json — 190 ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 codes (plus the historical codes BGS uses, such as YUG, CSK and DDR) mapped to a country name and a WGS84 centroid.

File format

Commodity files live at https://mineral.watch/map_data/data/<slug>.json and are keyed statistic → year → ISO3 code → quantity, in the unit given in meta.json:

{
  "Production": {
    "2024": { "CHL": 5300000, "COD": 3200000, "PER": 2700000, … },
    "2023": { … }
  },
  "Imports":  { "2024": { "CHN": …, "JPN": … }, … },
  "Exports":  { "2024": { "CHL": …, "PER": … }, … }
}

Files are static, CORS-readable and served over HTTPS, so you can fetch() them directly from a browser or pull them with curl. Quantities are numbers, never strings; a country absent from a year has no reported figure for it. Mine-stage series for cobalt, copper and nickel are metal content; refined and smelter series are gross tonnes — compare shares between stages, not absolute volumes.

curl -s https://mineral.watch/map_data/data/copper-mine.json | python3 -c "import json,sys; d=json.load(sys.stdin)['Production']['2024']; print(sorted(d.items(), key=lambda kv:-kv[1])[:5])"

Machine-readable access

• Structured data. Every page carries schema.org JSON-LD — Dataset, DataCatalog, WebPage, BreadcrumbList and FAQPage — with source citations, coverage, licence and download links.
• For AI assistants and crawlers. /llms.txt summarises the site and its key facts; /llms-full.txt adds each dashboard's questions and answers. Both follow the llms.txt convention.
• Site index. /sitemap.xml lists every page with its last-modified date; /robots.txt welcomes search and AI crawlers alike.
• Source code. The site, its dashboards and the tooling that builds this catalogue are on GitHub under AGPL-3.0.

Licence and citation

The compilation — selection, cleaning, cross-checking, geocoding and arrangement — is licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0; the sui generis database right is asserted. Use this credit line, hyperlinked where the medium allows, and credit the original publisher alongside it:

Full terms, including what needs a licence, are on the terms & licensing page and in the licensing notice. If you want the raw figures with no strings attached, go to the original BGS publication — that is the honest route and we will happily point you to the right table.

Corrections, bulk access and custom datasets

Data files last updated 2026-07-05. Catalogue generated 2026-09-05. © 2026 mineral.watch.