Derived island datasets for "Counting the Solomon Islands": USGS and OpenStreetMap islands clipped to the Solomon Islands EEZ

Derived geospatial datasets supporting the study "Counting the Solomon Islands: How Many Islands Does the Archipelago Actually Contain?" (Andås, 2026). These layers are the direct output of the methodology described in that paper's Section 3: island polygons from the USGS Global Islands dataset (Sayre et al., 2019; Sayre, 2023) and OpenStreetMap land polygons (OpenStreetMap contributors, n.d.), each clipped to the Solomon Islands Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ boundary source: Flanders Marine Institute, n.d.), reprojected to WGS84 (EPSG:4326), with per-feature area calculated using QGIS's ellipsoidal area method. The EEZ boundary layer included here has had interior topological holes removed (minimum hole area = 0) to prevent erroneous exclusion of small islands, as described in the source paper. These datasets allow independent verification of the island counts reported in the source paper (USGS: 1,738–1,771 islands; OSM: 3,540 islands) and support reuse for related research on Solomon Islands coastal geography. Original source data remain under their respective providers' licenses (USGS/Esri/UNEP-WCMC Global Islands: public domain; OpenStreetMap: Open Database License (ODbL) 1.0; Marine Regions EEZ: CC BY 4.0). This derived compilation is released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.