Security & access

What is public

Anyone can open the map, the official local-unit boundaries (Survey Department of Nepal via OCHA COD-AB), protected-area outlines, the recipe registry and the list of every data source. The underlying open datasets (NASA FIRMS, BIPAD, USGS, Hansen/UMD, WorldPop, ERA5 and others) stay under their own licences and can be downloaded from their providers.

What is restricted, and to whom

Who	Can see and do
Visitor (no account)	The map and boundaries.
New account, awaiting approval	The same as a visitor. Signing up alone unlocks nothing.
Approved member	GeoSutra's derived datasets (forest and population by place, climate normals, warming trends), analyses, layers, downloads, and their own saved areas.
Administrator (GeoSutra staff)	Everything above, plus approving accounts and viewing anonymous usage counts.

Restrictions are enforced on the server, not only hidden in the page. Restricted files are released only after the server checks the signed-in account's approval. Saved areas and analysis runs are protected by row-level security in the database, so each account can read only its own. The access rules are re-tested against the live site after each release.

Who approves accounts

A GeoSutra administrator approves each account by hand, after confirming who the person is and which organisation they work for. Access can be withdrawn at any time. To request access, create an account in the Observatory. To withdraw your own, write to us.

Where the data lives

• Website and computation: Cloudflare's global network. Most analyses run in your own browser, reading public satellite files directly, so your drawn areas are not sent to GeoSutra unless you press Save.
• Accounts, saved areas and daily fire/disaster history: a Supabase (PostgreSQL) database hosted outside Nepal. Passwords are handled by Supabase Auth and are never visible to GeoSutra.
• Usage counts: first-party and anonymous. A random ID is created per browser tab, with no cookies, no advertising trackers and no personal data.
• Questions typed into “Ask”: read by a keyword parser. Only when that fails does a small open model on Cloudflare Workers AI read them, and its job is only to pick a recipe. No question is sent to OpenAI, Google or Anthropic.

If your organisation requires data to stay in Nepal or under a specific agreement, tell us before you upload or save anything. We will say plainly whether we can meet that requirement.

How the site is protected

• HTTPS only, with HSTS.
• The map application runs code only from geosutra.com, under a strict content security policy. Its libraries are pinned and served from our own server.
• Forms and analysis endpoints are rate-limited per visitor.
• Keys that must stay secret are held only on the server. The keys visible in the page are public keys, limited by database rules.
• An automated check of who can read what runs after each release.

What we do not claim

GeoSutra is a small team. The Observatory has not yet had an independent penetration test or a formal certification such as ISO 27001, and we do not run a 24-hour security operations centre. Numbers on the map carry the accuracy and limitations stated in the methodology. They support official decisions but do not replace official surveys.

Report a problem

If you find a security issue, a wrong number or data that should not be visible, write to [email protected] with “Security” in the subject. We acknowledge within 3 working days and tell you what we changed. Please do not test by reading other people's data.

Last reviewed 24 September 2026.