Dialogue. Earlier today. MRG office.

- Hey, you have our Madagascar beetle data?
- yeees...
- I am going to need that file with occurrences for these genera...
- Sure! How do you want it?
- You know... in 50x50 km grid squares...(oh no!)... table with one row for each grid cell... (I knew it!)... species names in columns...(no way!)... occurrence counts per species per cell in between... by noon.
- (silence)

There are countless ways and approaches to this problem. GIS people know. They just know and that is why you go to them when you have a "question". Can we do it without them? Can it be done using our database management system?

Here I gave an example of generating print ready maps through EarthCape's built in reporting engine. In this post I briefly referred to distribution map generation in EarthCape but not necessarily in printed form, but rather within genuine GIS environment that is being built inside EC. There is no description of GIS features yet in Overview section, mainly because this is under so rapid development that any description would become outdated within weeks. So this post gives an example of using existing GIS data and outputting something useful, again, in sensible GIS format. It is a small example but it saved my day just today.

The idea is rather simple. You can import a vector file that serves as a "mask" - countries, provinces, grid cells - any polygon data (and from any GIS format). Next you highlight unit (specimen, observation) data, hit "Map" button, choose the map you want to use as background and the layer that is used for the mask and you get the map on the screen (map below is classified by species counts for certain genera).

 As requested, I needed to prepare a data file which would have presence/absence data for each species per each cell (as depicted above).

So I added some more functionality to map generation module that adds a column for each species to mask layer metadata with occurrence counts for each cell (as seen from Excel):

Of course the whole layer can be exported to any of these GIS format and used within specialized GIS tools:

- Here is your file
- Yeah. Cheers. I knew it's a 5 minute work...