Bioinformatics with Python Cookbook

Geo-referencing GBIF datasets

Here, we will work with the geo-referenced data from the GBIF dataset. We will take this opportunity to see how to interface with OpenStreetMap (https://www.openstreetmap.org), a freely available mapping service. We will also use a Python image processing library called Pillow (http://python-pillow.github.io/, which is based on PIL). You may want to read a little bit on both before starting. Tile Map Services (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/TMS) will be quite an important concept to get a basic grasp of. GBIF and OpenStreetMap tiles are available behind REST services.

In our example, we will try to extract information from GBIF using the geographic coordinates of the Galápagos archipelago.

Getting ready

You will ...