Quite a few things are going on in the world of GIS at the moment and since I'm needing to make mention of a handful of them in Dipterists Forum Bulletin which I edit I'm finding it very frustrating that we biogeographers don't have any centralised place to which readers can be directed for resources and facts.
We've got 3 new releases, MapWindow, QGIS and iMatch, the latter important due to new functionalities with geotagged images. We've got Tim Smith running a series of courses on "Practical Open Source GIS" which may begin to attract regular naturalists into taking an interest, we had OS's Phil Wyndham and his news item about "Working with Ordnance Survey geographic resources" in the latest NBN eNews (although frankly I'd be more interested to read about a deal for releasing 1:25,000 data for use on GPS devices)
Naturalists have always been interested in spotty maps and the interest in GIS is growing, with photography, extensive use of GPS (and SatNav), local groups (encouraged by their LERC's use of free GIS apps), increasing quantities of free data, and expectations raised due to the mapping functions found in many online and mobile devices. There will always be a large proportion of naturalists who want to do it themselves - it's in their nature.
So where do they go for advice and resources, to help them gain some of the know-how that workers in LERCs and other places have acquired? Well this site is a bit of a start but the information's a bit thin on the ground and well dispersed, not easy to find unless you know what you're looking for. OS have a GIS introduction at https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/suppor … nding-gis/ but their blog is for a broader audience than us Biogeographers.
I'd like to see a dedicated biogeography website, a blog/forum and maybe a journal (example https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1tWci … p=sharing) any offers?