Category: GIS

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Enclavism

This has very little to do with agrobiodiversity, but I couldn’t resist mentioning it. I got an email from my friend Robert Hijmans at IRRI pointing me to this little-known fact:

West Bengal has many small exclaves within the Rajshahi division of Bangladesh, and vice versa. According to Brendan Whyte’s thesis, there are 106 of them. For the height of complexity, a part of Dahala Khagrabari, India is surrounded by Bangladeshi territory (part of Upanchowki Bhajni, Bangladesh), which is itself surrounded by Balapara Khagrabari, India, which in turn is surrounded by Bangladesh. This is the world’s only counter-counter-enclave.

Robert and his team are trying to map this in GADM, not without a little difficulty. GADM is part of the BioGeoMancer project, about which I blogged way back.

GADM is a database of the location of the world’s administrative areas (boundaries). Administrative areas in this database are countries and lower level subdivisions such as provinces, departments, bibhag, bundeslander, daerah istimewa, fivondronana, krong, landsvæðun, opština, sous-préfectures, counties, and thana. GADM describes where these administrative areas are (the “spatial features”), and for each area it provides some attributes, foremost being the name and variant names.

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Dragon’s blood set to dry up

Having been involved in the botanical exploration of the Indian Ocean island of Socotra back in the early 90s, and also — more recently — having done some ecological niche modeling, I was fascinated to see these interests coincide in a recent paper in Biological Conservation. Italian and Yemeni researchers ((The Italian and Yemeni governments, UNDP and IUCN (among others) are financing a Socotra Conservation and Development Programme. Nothing like that when I was there, of course.)) have modeled the distribution of the Socotran endemic Dracaena cinnabari, the Dragonblood Tree, to predict what might happen to it with climate change. It’s not good. This flagship species, whose resin has been the source of a dye and medicine since antiquity, is looking at a halving of its potential area of distribution, due to drier conditions, and only a couple of its current localities will fall within what will remain suitable. Fortunately, they are near a protected area, and the authors recommend that its boundaries be expanded to include them.

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Mapping agricultural biodiversity et al.

The new Information Development is out and it is a special issue on “GIS and Spatial Information for Rural Development.” You can read the abstracts of papers on, among other things:

  1. generating detailed crop distribution maps for sub-Saharan Africa from much coarser input data  ((You, Liangzhi; Wood, Stanley; Wood-Sichra, Ulrike; Chamberlin, Jordan. Generating plausible crop distribution maps for sub-Saharan Africa using a spatial allocation model. Information Development 2007 23: 151-159))
  2. “An Atlas of the Ethiopian Rural Economy” ((Chamberlin, Jordan; Tadesse, Mulugeta; Benson, Todd; Zakaria, Samia. An Atlas of the Ethiopian Rural Economy: expanding the range of available information for development planning. Information Development 2007 23: 181-192))
  3. a “Socio-Economic Atlas of Vietnam” ((Epprecht, Michael; Heinimann, Andreas; Minot, Nicholas; Muller, Daniel; Robinson, Tim. From Statistical Data to Spatial Knowledge — informing decision-making in Vietnam. Information Development 2007 23: 193-204)) 

This last is actually online, and well worth having a look at, although it is pretty huge to download.

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The benefits of sharing

A post in Google Earth Blog alerted me to the great efforts by staff and students at the Faculty of Agronomy and Forest Engineering at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile to geo-tag the specimens in their herbarium. They’ve produced a Google Earth kml file to show hundreds of collecting locations throughout the country. Below are the localities of Persea lingue, a congener of the avocado, though I’m not sure how closely related they are. It’s threatened, according to IUCN, and indeed there’s only a couple of specimens in the herbarium, quite near each other:

persea-lingue-herb.jpg

Continue reading “The benefits of sharing”

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Mapping wild bovids

Michael’s post on the kouprey made me realize how ignorant I am on the subject of wild bovids. That, and news of the launch of the new GBIF portal, prompted some online fun and games last night.

I’ll just give you the edited highlights here. But I guarantee that playing with the GBIF data portal will keep you busy — and entertained — for hours.

I searched for all Bos spp specimens that GBIF has occurrence data for, then downloaded the resulting kml file and opened it in Google Earth. The map above is just a view of the records for SE Asia. Not that many, and none for the kouprey. Bos javanicus is the banteng. The records in southern Vietnam refer to specimens (stuffed, presumably, or maybe just skins, I’m not sure) from the Field Museum in Chicago.

I got quite excited when I saw the name of the collector. One T. Roosevelt. But it was not to be. This T. Roosevelt collected (shot?) the banteng specimen now in the Field Museum in 1929, which is ten years after the first President Roosevelt died.

I also did similar things for a couple of crop wild relatives, but I’ll keep that for another time. Remember, one of the data providers to GBIF is SINGER, to the tune of over half a million records of germplasm accessions of crops and wild crop relatives.

Later that day: So GBIF has a thing where you can send feedback on individual records, so I did that for T. Roosevelt’s banteng and within a few hours I had a email back from Larry Heaney at the Field Museum. It turns out that we’re dealing here with Teddy Jr, the president’s son, who spent a lot of time on expeditions in Asia. Larry says that there are also some specimens around collected by Teddy Jr’s brother, Kermit. Thanks, Larry. I don’t know quite why, but this whole story made my day.