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Your computer can become a window to anywhere on the planet, viewing high-resolution aerial and satellite imagery combined with GBIF-mediated data.
Regular visitors to the GBIF Data and Communications portals will have noticed a recent addition near the top of the left-hand menu: Google Earth.
Google Earth has many potential uses, including environmental planning visualisation. It was used at the World Summit for Sustainable Development in 2002 to highlight participating countries. And now, with the addition of GBIF data, it can be used to see not only where in the world a species lives, but also what the terrain is like at that spot, what the elevation is, and so on.
Google Earth is a community effort -- datasets can be added by anyone. Now, Google Earth can access GBIF-mediated data. The scripts that make this possible have been contributed to GBIF by Derek Munro of the Canadian Biodiversity Information Facility (CBIF).
To use Google Earth, your PC must have installed some software that can be downloaded for free.
After you have installed Google Earth, when you click on Google Earth on the GBIF portals, you will be taken to a page that includes some sample files. You can also type in the name of a species of your choice. If GBIF has data for that name, Google Earth will open and you can see the localities where your organism lives. These are plotted not on just an ordinary map, but on actual images of the Earth taken from airplanes or by satellites.
But that is not all! If you double-click on one of the icons that indicates one of the occurrences of your species, a dialog box will open that will take you directly into the GBIF Data Portal (you have to Agree to the Data Use Agreement) and to the actual data record for that occurrence.
Even better, for those who are engaged in digitising natural history specimen data, Google Earth can help with geo-referencing, measuring distances and describing habitat. How to add topographical layers to Google Earth using Web Map Service (WMS) is explained on a page that is linked from the GBIF and Google Earth page.
With this web-enabled capability to access geographic information system (GIS) layers (roads, terrain, latitude and longitude, water bodies, and many others) and combine them with GBIF-mediated species-occurrence data, GBIF users can perform their own GIS analyses and print out the results. This should move GBIF rapidly toward the goal of meeting user needs.
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