January 14th 2013 - New family and genus maps added

The title says it all.
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January 14th 2013 - New family and genus maps added

Post by Jools »

All,

The functionality and a considerable amount of data has been added to the site to plot on a map occurrence and type locality data. This gives a visual general feel for the natural distribution of a family or genus of catfish. The data for this are the rather fiddly latitude and longitude co-ordinate pairs (e.g. 27°04'17''S. 52°20'34''W). One digit wrong and a South American fish turns up in Norway - there are a few errors on the database and we'll fix them as we spot them (or you point them out) - but the visualisation of the data on a map makes this ongoing task so much easier too.

Example family page (Bagridae):
http://www.planetcatfish.com/catelog/fa ... #multi_map

Example genus page (Ancistrus):
http://www.planetcatfish.com/catelog/ge ... #multi_map

Much of this work (actually pretty much everything apart from initial google maps API work and some aestheics) were done by @MatsP.

Hope you like it!

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Re: January 14th 2013 - New family and genus maps added

Post by racoll »

Nice work guys!
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Re: January 14th 2013 - New family and genus maps added

Post by pleco_breeder »

Or a Hypostomus off the south coast of Ghana ;) There's a Harttia in Norway as well.

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Re: January 14th 2013 - New family and genus maps added

Post by MatsP »

Thanks for reporting those. The Harttia is already fixed (data update submitted, awaiting Jools' "checking and committing the change to the database" - which I'm sure is just a formality in this case, but I don't know what other items are "ahead in the queue"). I'm holding off the Hypostomus until I go through all of them, which is hopefully going to happen in a day or twos time [I've just started on Hypoptopoma, in alphabetical order]. When I'm working my way through, I check that:

1. The species has a type location.
2. That all occurrences in the "Distribution" are covered by occurrence records.
3. That all occurrence records have a location for the body of water.
4. That there is a reference to scientific literature.
5. That there is a size.

If anything else is obviously wrong, I'll try to fix that as well.

For most species, there's nothing much to do, but some take a bit of digging. And whilst finding Rio Amazonas on a map isn't too hard, finding Rio Escalante in Venezuela isn't quite so straight forward (it is not named on any of the maps I've got, so I have to use other geographic features to identify which river is which). I think when this is finished, we'll have one of the better databases of correlation between bodies of water and coordinates available on the web. There are certainly other sources for this that are good, but most are pretty incomplete and hard to find the right thing in. Islamic prayer time websites are fairly good, but they often have errors too, so it's necessary to double check [and most often refer to villages and towns rather than rivers and lakes].

Of course, most of yesterday was spent finding the bug that causes "Ancistrus chagresi" and many others to not show up on the map in the link above. Turned out it was a simple fix, once I'd identified what the problem was - identifying the problem wasn't quite so simple, as depending on what order I tried to display the species in, different ones would appear and go away. Jools is just about to upload the fixed code for that.

Edit: fixes for missing pins and Harttia are now online.
Edit2: the fixed missing pins shows some more species that are "wrong". I will fix those as I get to them - but feel free to report in "Bugs" section if you spot anything "wrong".

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Re: January 14th 2013 - New family and genus maps added

Post by Jools »

Yes, the Scandinavian suckermouth is no more. is still looking a bit African, but I'm sure Mats will look at that now that he's fixed my cosmetic meddling in the code he mentioned above.

Cheers,

Jools
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Re: January 14th 2013 - New family and genus maps added

Post by MatsP »

Well, at least "it's a different one in Norway now". I think it was one that "had no pin" before that got fixed. But we'll get there...

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Re: January 14th 2013 - New family and genus maps added

Post by Jools »

I've just gone through vetting a lot of data from Mats and the genus ' map is now looking great!

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Re: January 14th 2013 - New family and genus maps added

Post by MatsP »

Two improvements added to this project:
1. Species pages now use a single map, where you click on the map icon to get a map.
2. Type localities are now marked with a "pin" with a yellow star. Occurrences (that is, the list of rivers and lakes in the "distribution" field of a species) are marked with a "black dot". This applies to all of the new style maps, and the plan is to eventually replace all of the maps on the site with this style of map (and add maps to several other pages).

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