When we talk here about species distribution we are talking about geospatial species distributions. Sometimes this is also called Species Range. In simple words it is the places where a species live. Normally species live in an area so distributions are normally areas. 

For example the Cougar (Puma concolor) has the distribution shown in the right. These are places where you could find a Cougar.

In Internet you can find a lot of distributions like this in lot of different formats and shapes. Biodiversityatlas aims to serve as a central place from where to find them and access them in an coherent way. 

GBIF does not provide directly species distributions, they provide biodiversity primary data. Each record in GBIF primary data represent the observation of an species at a certain location and a certain time. This primary data can then be used to create distribution maps if the scientist think that the data is complete and so on. But because people publish just the primary data in GBIF we dont know if the data avaialble for a species is comprehensive and therefore we can not create a real distribution from it. What we will create is a "Uncheck, probably, incomplete distribution derived from primary data". Even if this is not a real distribution if it is of great use to crosscheck with other sources and in most situation it will be the only source available for a species.

The creation of distribution maps from GBIF primary data is done trough the creation of density maps based on grids. What we take is the primary data and plot it into a grid (of different scales). We count the number of times an occurrence fail in a cell of the grid so we get like a map of the density of occurrences available in GBIF for a certain species. We represent with different colors the grid cells depending on how many records we have on it.

Name	Comment	Link
GBIF Primary data	GBIF already provides density information based on same grid cells we are using. There is also services to ask about data inside grid cells.	http://data.gbif.org/ws/rest/density/list?taxonconceptkey=
BiodiversityIndex	Tim is working on a side project to index biodiversity primary data from the internet. We could make use of this? It promises more data than GBIF.	Not yet available.

Several projects are publishing species distributions as vector polygons to represent in GIS applications. For example the Atlas of United States Trees published the distribution of trees in Shapefiles. The same way does the Global Register of Migratory Species and we are working with them to make their data published in biodiversityatlas.

Name	Comment	Link
GROMS	Kalus Riede is willing to provide us with shapefiles for migratory species. This is the data we are using for development. The distributions consits of mutiple polygons with different status like breeding and so on.	http://www.groms.de/
Atlas of United States Trees	The data is published on shapefiles. We have not contact them to see if we could use their data.	http://esp.cr.usgs.gov/data/atlas/little/
Digital Distribution Maps of the World's Amphibians	The data is available at IDRISI and Shapefiles format. This data is published on the EDIT project at MNCN Madrid. Jorge Lobo, who is in charged of the project, is willing to have the data being published.	http://edit.csic.es/Fauna.html

Projects like the Flora Europea base their distributions on grid systems. In their case they use squares of c. 50 km x 50 km, based on the Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) projection and the Military Grid Reference System (MGRS).

Some project also make use of administrative regions.

Other projects, like Euro+Med PlantBase, uses their own regions definitions, look at their codes here. A standard for regions for use in recording biodiversity is also available from TDWG, is called World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions and is available as Shapefiles.

 

Actually most of the distributions being published in Internet nowadays in unfortunately only available as simple images. Normally no information on spatial reference is provide and they use different kinds of base maps for presentation. In wikipedia there is lot of distributions like this.

We intent to be able to accommodate this data also in our data model.