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Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences

Tracking 19th Century Late Blight From Archival Documents Using Text Analytics And Geoparsing, Laura Tateosian, Rachael Guenter, Yi-Peng Yang, Jean Ristaino Sep 2017

Tracking 19th Century Late Blight From Archival Documents Using Text Analytics And Geoparsing, Laura Tateosian, Rachael Guenter, Yi-Peng Yang, Jean Ristaino

Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) Conference Proceedings

In 1845, Ireland's potato crop was struck by a devastating potato disease that killed Ireland’s crop caused devastation for seven years and led to mass starvation and emigration from the country. The cause of the potato destruction was a fungus-like plant pathogen. There are several theories about the origin of the disease and the source of the 19th century outbreaks. We use historical documents contemporary to that time to investigate spatial information that might inform these mysteries. We present methodologies for automatically extracting information from these voluminous data sources. We identify and map geographic locations that are proximate in the …


Processing Conservation Indicators With Open Source Tools: Lessons Learned From The Digital Observatory For Protected Areas, Lucy Bastin, Andrea Mandrici, Luca Battistella, Grégoire Dubois Sep 2017

Processing Conservation Indicators With Open Source Tools: Lessons Learned From The Digital Observatory For Protected Areas, Lucy Bastin, Andrea Mandrici, Luca Battistella, Grégoire Dubois

Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) Conference Proceedings

The European Commission has a commitment to open data and the support of open source software and standards. We present lessons learnt while populating and supporting the web and map services that underly the Joint Research Centre's Digital Observatory for Protected Areas. Challenges include: large datasets with highly complex geometries; topological inconsistencies, compounded by reprojection for equal-area calculations; multiple different representations of the same geographical entities, for example coastlines; licensing requirement to continuously update indicators to respond to monthly changes in the authoritative data. In order to compute and publish an array of indicators, we used a range of open …