Distribution maps - basic help needed

[Paulo Andreas Buckup]

Doug Yeanega wrote,

> the "point and click" idea is one that was not fully explored, though it
> comes close to what I had then suggested would be an "ideal" system. The
> problem still remains that gazetteers (which is essentially what your
> proposed list of state/county values would be) cannot extrapolate for
> locality records at specific spots which are not themselves listed in the
> gazetteer. For example "KANSAS: Neosha River at I-335" would be meaningless
> to a gazetteer (and given the structure you suggest, its lack of a county
> name would be troublesome), but if one had a fine-scale on-screen map, it
> would be simplicity itself to point and click to get *exact* lat/long
> coordinates. This would transform what is now the laborious process of
> sifting through map libraries, finding one with the right scale, and then
> figuring out the lat/long coordinates manually, perhaps in conjunction with
> a gazetteer - reducing the problem to one that can be handled on one's
> desktop, so instead of taking a half hour per locality look-up, it would
> only take a few minutes at most.
This is already a reality.  One such system is the software FishMap which
I developed to produce publication-quality maps.  It has two versions: a
stand-alone version, and a version that works with MUSE.  The MUSE
version, in addition to being able to create coordinates from
on-screen maps also performs gazeteer searches of the kind described by Julian
Humphries.

To see published maps produced by FishMap using exactly the kind of technique
described by Doug, see Icthyological Exploration of Freshwaters, 4(2):97-154.

Please note: anybody on Taxacom replying to this trend shuld also email me
directly, because I just set Taxacom to NOMAIL for a couple of weeks (I'm
about to leave to visit museums in Europe).

Paulo A. Buckup
Dept. de Vertebrados
Museu Nacional
Quinta da Boa Vista
20940-040 Rio de Janeiro, RJ
Brazil

email: buckup at omega.lncc.br