Category Archives: Data sources

What if Google decides to discontinue Google Scholar?

Posted on April 10, 2013 by

Since Google discontinued Google reader I have always been wondering; what if they decide to stop with Google Scholar? If you are lucky enough to have access to an university library, you should be fine. But there are also a … Continue reading →

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A wealth of knowledge on biological diversity at your fingertips

Posted on October 3, 2012 by

I love this website of the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Through this website, a consortium of natural history and botanical libraries have made available the legacy literature of biodiversity held in their collections.

Posted in botany, Data sources, history, vegetation | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

New: Quantum map, a simplified QGIS version

Posted on August 18, 2012 by

An announcement on the QGIS mailing list about NIWA Quantum map made me curious. How is this going to differ from QGIS? As it turns out, NIWA Quantum map is basically QGIS with a simplified interface, i.e., it has some … Continue reading →

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Poverty maps on HarvestChoice

Posted on May 9, 2012 by

Data on poverty levels, important for amongst others development study, yet very difficult to get. Sure, you can get global statistics from e.g., the FAO, Worldbank, here or here. But these give you highly aggregated data (mostly by country), not … Continue reading →

Posted in Data sources, QGIS | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Update of GADM datasets

Posted on March 25, 2012 by

It is always good to keep an eye on your data sources if you don’t want to miss out on new versions. Like the Global Administrative Areas database (GADM), which published version 2 of their data set earlier this year … Continue reading →

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New overview of free GIS datasets

Posted on August 22, 2011 by

Check out this link, it contains a long list with free data sources: http://freegisdata.rtwilson.com/

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Reverb; new tool on the NASA site to search, find and download data

Posted on May 17, 2011 by

I was looking today for the most convenient way to download the MODIS landcover data from the LP DAAC. In between the 7! different portals one would expect at least one to be easy, but it was only the 8th … Continue reading →

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Online data: map of global urbanization

Posted on March 26, 2011 by

This is an interesting data source on urban extent I hadn’t come across yet. It is based on Modis data and available at http://sage.wisc.edu/people/schneider/research/data.html and is described in more detail in an article by Scheider et al. (2009). Also check … Continue reading →

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Visualizing confidence in data on map: example of SoilWeb Mobile

Posted on March 17, 2011 by

See this post for a nice example how one can display the level of confidence in the data presented for a mapping unit on a map. The SoilWeb provides the distance from the nearest map unit polygon boundary. It gives … Continue reading →

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Should you georeference your scientific data?

Posted on January 24, 2011 by

As Jeff Thurston writes in his blog, a strong case can be made for spatially enabling scientific research. This is especially true for biological / ecological research as biological processes occur across different scales. It certainly would make it that … Continue reading →

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