Patricia Mergen (RMCA) will now be leading the WP5.4 geographical component activity in Belgium.
If you have any queries regarding WP5's geographical components please contact Patricia Mergen.
The HTML compilation and link collection of relevant European databases on environmental and biological data (http://edit.csic.es/Databases.html), includes:
- Databases on surface units (administrative units and regular equal-area units): Sources of the GIS layers of surface units available at the Geoplatform (http://edit.csic.es/).
- Databases on environmental data: Sources of the GIS layers of environmental variables available at the Geoplatform, together with other interesting databases on various environmental issues at the global and European extent.
- Databases on biological data: Taxonomic databases for the whole biota of for specific groups.
EDIT geoplatform (http://edit.csic.es/GISdownloads.html) provides standard GIS layers of surface units (countries, squares, ...) to evaluate the spatial distribution of occurrence data -spatial completeness-, and standard GIS layers of environmental variables (climate, topography,...) to evaluate weather occurrence data represent adequately the gradients of environmental variation -environmental completeness-.
Taxonomists have to continue doing what they have done during the last three hundred years: to describe the variety of life organisms and their location. Although this colossal task is important by itself its relevance is higher now due to current need of reliable biodiversity data. In the attached report we review the available scientific information on the possibilities and usefulness of the compiled species distribution data for basic and applied purposes, two of the deliverables of EDIT Work Package 5.4 “Geographical platform components” (deliverables 5.35 -Predictive distribution modelling report- and 5.38 -Gap analysis in local inventories report-).
We are delighted to welcome Dorottya Varsányi from the Hungarian Natural History Museum, London, to the WP5 team!
Dorottya Varsányi will be compiling test datasets from the book of Fauna of Aggtelek National Park and georeferencing that data. She is working together with Andras Gubanyi.