Welcome to the home page for Electronic Distribution Maps of Caribbean Fungi.

This project, funded by the British Council, had its origins in an earlier UK Darwin Initiative project Fungi of the Caribbean. Among other outputs, the Darwin Initiative project resulted in almost 150,000 computerized database records each representing an individual observation of a particular organism. A little over half of the records are of fungi. Most of the remainder are of the plants with which these fungi occur. For some of these records, the only locality information available was the fact that the organism was observed in the Carribean or in some specific country. For many others, however, information is much more detailed. All of that information was made available in book form in the following publication: Minter, D.W.; Rodríguez Hernández, M.; Mena Portales, J. (2001). Fungi of the Caribbean. An annotated checklist. 946 pp. [including 1 black & white plate and 1 colour plate]. UK, Middlesex, Isleworth; PDMS Publishing [ISBN 0 9540169 0 4].

Objectives

The objectives of the present project were as follows.

• To allocate latitude and longitude information to as many as possible of these records.
• To modify existing software to permit production of electronic maps of the Caribbean.
• To produce distribution maps of different fungi of the Caribbean, using the UK Darwin Initiative project data together with mapping software.

The following notes assume a familiarity with the field structures and data standards used in the database for biological recording. For information about these field structures and data standards, see Data structure for biological recording. The database was queried to obtain all records where [CloxAcmajA] (English version of accepted name for continent or major area of observation) equalled "Caribbean".

This selection was then edited to ensure that all records contained consistent information in [CloxAccouA] (English name of country), [CloxAcstaA] (English name of state or province) and [CloxAcplaA] (English description of exact locality). Care was taken to ensure that information in [CloxAcplaA] was correctly structured, with largest place first, and with subsequent more detailed place names separated by semi-colons.

A second query was then run, to obtain all records where [Cco0AccnaA] (text link to the currently accepted organism name) contained the name of a fungus at a taxonomic rank of species or lower. This was the subset from which all distributional information for individual maps was derived.

These records were then sorted alphabetically by [CloxAcplaA] and, using a internet and printed gazetteers and maps of the Caribbean, latitude and longitude information was calculated to a level appropriate for the accuracy of the information in [CloxAcplaA]. In many cases it was possible to be accurate to the nearest minute, while in other cases an accuracy to ten minutes or even only to the nearest degree was possible. Latitude information for each record was then entered in [CloxLat__A], and longitude information was entered in [CloxLong_A].

After that work was completed, electronic maps were prepared for Caribbean fungi showing the distribution of species and subspecific taxa. DMAP was the mapping software used. Access to maps is through the scientific name of the organism.

Citing this work

This work may be cited as: Minter, D.W.; Mena Portales, J.; Rodríguez-Hernández, M.; Iglesias Brito, H.; Camino Vilaró, M.; Mercado Sierra, Á. (2002). Electronic Distribution Maps of Caribbean Fungi. www.biodiversity.ac.psiweb.com/carimaps. [website version 1.00].