BioGIS: Biodiversity Geographic Information System

ALEJANDRO F. ROZENFELD

Evora

Workshop; 2018 special International Biogeography Society meeting on Climate Change Biogeography; 2018

BioGIS is a platform for visual inspection and analyses of large biodiversity data sets. It is a fully fledged geographical information system with functions that until recently were only available in WORLDMAP (a computer program developed by Paul Williams at the Natural History Museum and that was discontinued in the late 90s). Analytical functions include species richness, dispersal field and rarity analysis, spatial turnover (beta diversity), temporal turnover, spatiotemporal turnover, and overlays of 1-D, 2-D, and 3-D scores on maps. The program allows importing data in several formats, including shape files, raster files, and data matrices of several kinds (thus being able to smoothly communicate with BIOMOD, BIOENSEMBLES, and other modelling software). The program is being developed as part of a partnership involving Alejandro Rozenfeld, Carsten Rahbek, and Miguel B. Araújo.BioGIS constitutes a multiplatform, object oriented and stand-alone analytical tool developed on MATLAB. It combines efficient management of big matrices and graphical capabilities to perform complex analysis and deploy results onto maps at multiple scales.It?s been mainly developed as an analytical tool-box environment to help researchers and get them inspired to formulate new questions on ecology and biogeography. It is a full-day workshop organized into three sessions. In the first session, the whole system will be extensively explained. In the second session, a full tutorial will be demonstrated stressing the system with different data set formats. In the third session, we will help participants to apply BioGIS on their own data sets.