Welcome to the home page of the Royal Society's two year project Electronic Distribution Maps of Ukrainian Fungi, which began in April 1998. This website provides basic information about the objectives of the project.
This project had its origins in the earlier UK Darwin Initiative project Fungi of Ukraine. Among other outputs, the Darwin Initiative project resulted in almost 80,000 computerized database records. These represent individual observations of different organisms in Ukraine. A little over half the records are of fungi. Most of the remainder are of the plants on which these fungi occur. For some of these records, the only locality information available is the fact that the organism was observed in Ukraine. For many more, however, information is much more detailed. In most cases the oblast (Ukrainian equivalent of state or county) in which the organism was observed has been noted, and in many of these, the raion (oblast subdivision or Ukrainian equivalent of parish), the town, village or settlement, and even the precise field or piece of woodland has been recorded. In such cases, the latitude and longitude of collection can be worked out, leading to the possibility of producing maps showing the distribution of individual organisms. The objectives of the present project were therefore as follows.
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 [CloxAccouA] (English version of accepted name for country of observation) equalled "Ukraine".
This selection was then edited to ensure that all records with information in [CloxAcstcA] (name of oblast in original language) and [CloxAcplcA] (description of exact locality in original language) also contained information in [CloxAcstaA] (English version of name of oblast) and [CloxAcplaA] (English version of 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 [CloxAcstaA] (English version of name of oblast) contained some information, and all selected records were checked to ensure that the English version of name of the oblast was correct in each record. This was the subset from which all distributional data for individual maps was derived.
These records were then sorted alphabetically by [CloxAcplaA] and, using a gazetteer and maps of Ukraine, 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].
The political outline of Ukraine was derived from a map of the country with latitudinal and longitudinal information. This information was keyboarded into a database containing three fields: latitude, longitude, and notes. In each record of the database it was accurate to one minute, and was separated from that of the previous record by a gap of one minute. Records containing no data in both co-ordinate fields indicated a `pen up' instruction, and were used to separate the mainland from islands. The oblast boundary information was entered in the same database. The resulting information was then used to produce various test maps such as the one at the head of this page.
To make individual maps, the subset was then queried for names of individual fungal species in [Cco0AccnaA] (currently accepted name of organism). Two passes were then made through the records. The first pass dealt with records where latitude and longitude information was absent, or was accurate only to the nearest degree. Use of the distributional data of these records resulted in shading of the relevant oblast. The second pass then dealt with records accurate to ten minutes or to one minute. These were used to superimpose individual circular dots in a different colour over the oblast information. Each dot was centred on the middle of the relevant ten minute notional square.
At the end of the project, electronic maps will be prepared for Ukrainian fungi and plants showing the distribution of species and subspecific taxa, with additional maps showing the distribution of genera, families, orders, classes, divisions and kingdoms. Within each taxonomic level, access to maps will be through the scientific name of the organisms at that rank. In the case of known homonyms, additional information will be provided to help the user to select the desired taxon. A CD-ROM will be prepared with all the resulting maps available in HTML format, with copies available (after the end of April 2000) for a nominal cost to cover production, postage and packing. Interested parties are invited to contact the project leader.
Click here to view a sample of fifty distribution maps of fungal species on this website.
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
| Previous page
Biodiversity Website: home page | Author: D.W. Minter |