Category Archives: Data sources

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 →

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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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Major conservation biology textbook now free online

Posted on January 20, 2011 by

Conservation Biology for All, a book edited by Navjot S. Sodhi of the National University of Singapore and Paul R. Ehrlich of Stanford University, has been posted on mongabay.com, an environmental science and conservation news site. Go here to download … Continue reading →

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

Mapping Forest resource assessment 2010 data – part I

Posted on January 12, 2011 by

About a year ago I wrote a post about how to make a map showing deforestation rates in Africa based on the Global Forest Assessment 2005 by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nation (FAO). The main purpose … Continue reading →

Posted in Data handling, Data sources, forest, GIS, GIS software, GRASS GIS | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Importing WorldClim climate .bil datalayers in GRASS GIS II

Posted on November 30, 2010 by

I uploaded an update to the R script I posted earlier to import data downloaded from WorldClim into GRASS. The main change is that it unzips and imports one grid at a time into GRASS, thus requiring much less free … Continue reading →

Posted in climate change, Data handling, Data sources, GIS, GRASS GIS, R computing environment | Tagged , , , , | 6 Comments