[Taxacom] From the Ramsar Forum - Species Grids - a new SEDAC data release

[Lee Belbin]

>From the RAMSAR Forum and hopefully of interest to this community:

NASA's Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC), based at CIESIN,
has gridded nearly 12,000 species distribution maps which were originally in
vector format (ESRI shapefile). The original data were developed by a
consortium of conservation organizations including NatureServe, IUCN,
Conservation International, and World Wildlife Fund-USA. To make these data
more useful for modeling and for integration with socioeconomic and other
data, SEDAC converted the entire collection of shapefiles to raster format. 

This newly released Web site provides a search facility for quickly locating
and downloading 1-kilometer (30 arc-second) resolution grids of selected
species maps in GeoTIFF format. Data are available for global amphibian
distributions, and for birds and mammals in the Americas. The Web site
provides access to individual species distribution grids, along with family
grids that show the density and distribution of species within a given
family.

Web site: http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/species/ 


SEDAC is one of the earth science data centers in NASA's Earth Observing
Data and Information System, operated by the Center for International Earth
Science Information Network (CIESIN) at the Lamont Campus of Columbia
University in Palisades, New York.



Lee Belbin

TDWG Secretariat