European Micropezids & Tanypezids

Countries are thirsty for summarized data and insights for policy-making but we are running short of tools (Martinez, 2023)

Biogeography

Fundamentals of Biogeography

The discipline of biogeography provides a number of tools which can be used to elucidate various aspects of the natural history of species. Two excellent books on this topic are:

Franklin, J. (2009). Mapping species distributions: spatial inference and prediction. Landscape Ecology Journal of Vegetation Science.
Huggett, R. J. (2005). Fundamentals of Biogeography, 2nd Edition. Geographical Research (Vol. 43).

The species distribution maps on this site arise from researched analyses. Each point or polygon thus has a detailed provenance ranging from details of verified species occurrences (published1), through images posted on forums to published country checklists and other literature.
The maps are created using a Geographical Information System and output to image files, accessible in the Distribution section to each taxon (alongside links to online sources)

Several standards are adopted in the creation of these maps, notably country outlines and definitions from TDWG and standards for projections, grids and presentation from the European Environment Agency

Online mapping systems have little analytical capacity. Though the maps depicted on this site are fixed in time, some analytical GIS work is ongoing (currently Micropeza lateralis & Rainieria calceata, the latter mapped onto LANMAP on this site)


  1. Published: To Global Biodiversity Gateways (NBN Atlas & GBIF) though some cannot be published in this way. For example there is no mechanism available to the author to upload all the French records received from Phil Withers, occurences extracted from Europaean papers or indeed European records of my own.
Scratchpads developed and conceived by (alphabetical): Ed Baker, Katherine Bouton Alice Heaton Dimitris Koureas, Laurence Livermore, Dave Roberts, Simon Rycroft, Ben Scott, Vince Smith