Dear Geostats Members: I am a botanist at The New York Botanical Garden. My colleagues and I study plants, and many of us focus on tropical plant groups. We have six million specimens in our collection from all over the world. The emphasis of my e-mail message to you today involves plants of tropical America (neotropics).
Two of us here at the garden have been applying multivariate statistical procedures in our research to test patterns of species distribution and morphological variation. We use these stats to test such things as species boundaries, and to figure out which morphological characters are contributing to patterns of variation. We use both quantitative and qualitative data (i.e., leaf length in cm; presence/absence of leaf pubescence-- ordinal data-- 0/1/2). On the side, separate from stats, we use ArcView GIS to plot plant distributions onto geospatial data layers. Currently I plot specimen collection locality points into my ArcView projects. I then bring in layers, such as USGS DEMs and other environmental data from ArcAtlas and ArcWorld to allow more detailed visualization, presentation, and understanding of plant distribution patterns. We are now interested in bringing statistics and GIS together in order to statistically analyze distribution patterns of plants and display the results of this analysis in the GIS presentation system. For instance, we have a growing database for our plants. The database represents information collected from individual plant specimens, including locality, coordinates, habitat, and plant morphology. How can we bring regression, correlation, multivariate statistics, and more into our GIS work? Where does one run the calculations? Can we do that in ArcView? We have ArcView Spatial Analyst, but it seems to me that calculations are very simple with that extension, i.e., nothing as powerful as a statistics package such as SysStat or others. Another challenge we have is multiple specimens per locality. Imagine that each specimen is represented by the same 50 morphological data points (measurements and ordinal scores). If there are 50 specimens at one point (i.e., Iquitos, Peru), and each of the specimens has 50 data points, when we run a simple grid analysis of one morphological character (i.e., leaf length), the resulting grid point system represents only the specimens sitting 'on top'. Do you understand? This is one example of problems we are facing. Is anybody interested in a collaboration that would lead to collaborative grants and projects? We're thinking of setting up a model system (or using a system that has already been developed) to analyze distribution of our specific plant groups (palms, wild nutmeg trees, and Brazil nut trees-- several thousand species in total). We would want to correlate morphological trends with geospatial data to better understand distribution patterns. Currently we are looking at collections from Mesoamerica (Mex and Central America). By simple plotting of points we are already seeing patterns that have never been published. There are gaps in distribution that relate to historical deforestation, minute and major changes in habitat, changes in rainfall, etc. These patterns have significant implications for conservation of Mesoamerican habitats and for understanding distribution of species, speciation patterns, and diversity patterns. We are botanists. That is what we do best. We are not computer experts, although they run the show these days in our work. If we spend all of our time doing the stats and the geospatial analysis, we'll never have time to continue generating the datasets for the plants we study. The datasets are built through field and herbarium (botanical museum) work. We're also discussing the idea of incorporating molecular data into the 'geospatial system', especially population genetics data, but that is another story for another day. What we need is a collaborative team. Before we can build that team, we need some feedback. Perhaps there are folks out there who are looking for additional exciting projects from the computer and geospatial side. If so, please contact us. We have six million specimens in the herbarium of The New York Botanical Garden (www.nybg.org/bsci.htm). The specimens are important for understanding species, for identifying species, and for vouchering other studies based on these collections (e.g., molecular analyses are vouchered by the herbarium specimen of the species being analyzed). What we don't see is an effort to take these specimens and make geospatial sense out of them. We are interested in setting up a model system that will include: 1. plant specimens 2. plant species 3. geospatial data 4. gis mapping 5. geospatial analysis 6. analysis 7. visualization 8. presentation through paper publication 9. presentation through an interactive website at nybg.org For the plants, we have plenty of data and some preliminary products. WE will post some of the preliminary products to the internet this month. But, our preliminary products do not take into account the amazing level of resources and analysis that I think are available in the geospatial community. If this sounds interesting, please contact us through me at: John Janovec Institute of Systematic Botany The New York Botanical Garden Bronx, NY 10458 tele: 718-543-8292 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (An e-mail contact is best to start with). Thank you for your time! I am anxious to see if this e-mail will help me generate some new contacts. I just signed up with this mailing list. John Janovec -- * To post a message to the list, send it to [EMAIL PROTECTED] * As a general service to the users, please remember to post a summary of any useful responses to your questions. * To unsubscribe, send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with no subject and "unsubscribe ai-geostats" followed by "end" on the next line in the message body. 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