DIVA running on the web

AVID-GIS, the command-line companion application of DIVA-GIS is being used to run species distribution models on the web. You can see this on the Biomaps website or the Australian National Museum (select a species name, query for that species, make a map, and press on "model").

Another implementation is in the virtual herbarium of Utah Valley State College. They also provide some good tips about how to set up your own virtual collection.

Enhanced: Distance

I have negelected this blog for a while, but here we go again.

While measuring a distance by drawing a line on the screen, the distance is now reported as one extends the line. You can now measure distance in meters, kilometers and miles (set your preference under Map/properties). The coordinates of the end of the line are copied to the clipboard. Version 5.4.0.1

This was requested by Matt Buys (and it had been on the to-do list for a while). It it very handy for georeferencing a locality like "12 miles north of Petaluma, along highway 101".

DIVA uses mapobjects LT and reporting the distance while drawing the line is not supported. But after learning some some Windows drawing tricks ("drawing on the device context of the component") I was able to find a work around.

Bug fixed: labels

Kenton Williams reported that the label dialog shows the fields of the LAST layer that had its symbology changed (if a change was made); not that of the active layer. Fixed in version 5.2.0.5

Bug fixed: grid to FLT & IMG

Fixed a bug in export grid to FLT, reported by Coen Bussink. The nodata (null) values were not exported correctly (in relation to what was written to the HDR file). He also noted that when exporting to IDRISI the .doc file always had the default output name (= the name of the input grid) even if the .img filename was changed. Version 5.2.0.4

Spamming is hard

I have been trying to send an announcement to all registered DIVA-GIS users. ~5000 email addresses. Spamming is hard! In the first batch, the link to the diva-gis org website in the message was broken due to a link introduced by my email program. Then I learned that most email systems do not accept messages sent to >100 addresses (and I did not understand the error message at first so I resend the announcement to quite a few people...). OK, so you have to do it in small portions. Can do. But then I maxed out on the daily quotum of my ISP for diva-gis.org. I switched to gmail, but they maxed me out too. The upshot is that I found this useful gmail netiquete of bulk mail. Anyway, 80% done now. One more day/quotum. This is the message I am trying to get out:

We would like to announce the release of DIVA-GIS ver. 5.2. DIVA-GIS is a free computer (ms windows) program for mapping and analysis of spatial data. Its principal goal is to support biodiversity research. It can be downloaded from http://www.diva-gis.org

Version 5 includes numerous improvements. For example, there is expanded support for species distribution modeling, the use of stacks (multiple grids), and the use of very large files. The manual has also been updated.

While we work on the next major release, we will continue to refine the manual and try to fix any bugs in this version. As always, we welcome bug reports and suggestions for additional functionality.

Other news: A beta-version of AVID-GIS, a command line program that allows for easy scripting has been released and is also available from the same website. Its functions are a subset of those available in DIVA-GIS.

Best regards, the DIVA-GIS developers.

You received this message because you requested email updates when you registered on the DIVA-GIS website. If you do not want to receive messages from us about diva-gis, please reply with "unsubscribe" in the subject or message body of your email.

Bug fixed: Stack/Regression

Fixed a bug that made Stack/Regression crash (version 5.2.0.3). This is probably one of the least frequently used functions. It can be used to assess grid cell level change across a time series of grids. It maps r2 and the slope of the linear regression line. What it does not do yet is map the statistical support for the slope being not zero (p-values).

What is it with all these bugs? Well, the code of all the grid operations has been completely overhauled. It is now fully object-oriented, and much easier to use, but the transition has been a bit rocky. This overhaul is part of an overall redesign of DIVA-GIS, that will become visible with the next major release. It has also proved useful in porting some of the code to Java, for two web-based software development projects. These projects are biogeomancer, which is concerned with automatic georeferencing of textual locality data, and digir-mapper, which, among other things, develops web services that enrich point based species occurence data (annotation, look up of environmental attributes, and distribution modeling).

We need your support!

Now I have a blog, why not a PayPal account? I set one up, and can now accept donations to support DIVA-GIS....

Bug fixed; aggregate

Brody Sandel pointed out an error in the Grid/Aggregate(mean|ignorenodata) function for cells that contain Nodata values. I fixed this in version 5.2.0.2 (available as update).