Americas Basemap

[Neill, Amanda]

Some of you may be interested in the following new product:

****************************************************************

A Digital Basemap for Studying the Neotropical Flora

Nat Bletter, John Janovec, Berry Brosi, Douglas C. Daly, W. Thomas, C.
Peters.  The New York Botanical Garden.  February 2003 and beyond.

Despite advances in GIS and remote-sensing technology and software, to date
most systematists and other botanists working on the Neotropical flora,
particularly on the monographic series Flora Neotropica, have used hard-copy
maps.  These maps make it possible to see basic distribution patterns, but
they are highly inaccurate, and the fact that the data are not compiled in
digital form means that it is difficult or impossible to retrieve the
metadata (i.e., the collection data and attributes of the specimen(s)
associated with each point on the map), select and combine distribution data
sets for various organisms, perform spatial statistics on the distributions,
or overlay species distributions onto maps of soils, climate, and other
environmental variables.  In an effort to help modernize Neotropical plant
studies and make GIS more accessible to botanists, we have developed a
digital base map of the Americas with multiple registered map layers that
can be superimposed in any combination and can be used to easily create
digital distribution maps from collection lists for dissemination and
analysis.

Read more about The Americas Base Map:

http://www.nybg.org/bsci/digital_maps/

Also linked from:

www.botanypages.org

****************************************************************