Maps of native ranges of tropical and subtropical plants created by GIS

Abstract

This article presents various methods employed for construction of maps of native ranges of plants using geographical information system (GIS). The maps were originally created for a set of publications on important tropical and subtropical plants species kept in the collections of Flora Olomouc Exhibition Grounds, JSC., Czech Republic. Two different approaches were applied using outlined and chorochromatic methods. The former was used for construction of maps depicting approximate ranges, i.e., ranges which cannot be constructed exactly due to the objective lack of biogeographical data (e.g. early domesticated crops, which no longer occur in the wild). The latter approach was used for construction of maps showing known ranges, i.e., ranges that can be constructed more or less exactly because there is no considerable lack of biogeographical data. The maps of known ranges could be further divided according to the total area of the depicted range, its shape or location. The paper also presents plans of the greenhouses and the exhibition complex at Flora Olomouc Exhibition Grounds, using a different type of thematic maps useful for large-scale mapping of living collections.

Keywords:

• thematic map
• GIS
• cartography
• biogeography
• native range

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zdena Dobesova

Zdena DOBESOVA, PhD, Ing. She has several lectures for study branch Geoinformatics and Geography at Palacky University in Olomouc, Czech Republic). Her research interests are GIS, digital cartography, the visual programming language in GIS, scripting in Python for ArcGIS, spatial databases. She is and author of 8 books and more than 70 articles from journals and conferences.

Ales Vavra

Ales VAVRA, PhD, Mgr. He holds Ph.D. degree at Geoinformatics and Cartography at Palacky University from 2015. The doctoral thesis was titled Phenological mapping of landscape by GIT. His specialisation is geovisualisation of enviromental data.

Martin Dancak

Martin DANCAK, PhD, Mgr. His specialisation is systematics (taxonomy), botany and ecology. Research interests are tropical and subtropical plants. He is a lecturer and researcher at Department of Ecology and Environmental Sciences of Palacky University in Olomouc. He wrote more than 50 articles nad books.