1

Re: Irish Watsonian Vice County boundaries

I'm trying to find a shapefile for the Irish Watsonian Vice County boundaries. There appears to only be England, Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland available through the downloads page.

Could someone point me to it if it is hosted here, or suggest where else I may be able to acquire it.

2

Re: Irish Watsonian Vice County boundaries

I've got a feeling when the rest of the VCs were digitized by NBN et al, the funding was only available for Britain.

Charlie Barnes
Information Officer
Greater Lincolnshire Nature Partnership

3 (edited by Darwyn Sumner 14-12-2016 07:57:35)

Re: Irish Watsonian Vice County boundaries

I don't know if this old enquiry was ever answered elsewhere but I've tracked them down today.
Firstly you've a free Ireland outline at http://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?i … 65a0f450b6
Then the background to the OpenStreetMap Irish Vice Counties project at http://www.openstreetmap.ie/irish-vice … streetmap/
A lot of scrolling down to find the download link, it's a link in the GitHub paragraph and downloadable from https://github.com/SK53/Irish-Vice-Counties click the green download button to get a zip containing the Irish VCs either with the Irish Grid or WGS84 CRS, either one shp file for the lot or individual VCs in different folders.

The grid is a different matter, it's discussed at http://www.osi.ie/resources/reference-i … ce-system/ and elsewhere by other users like BSBI and BRC. Rich Burkmar tells me that the grid-maker part of his TomBio tools for QGIS should be able to create tiles wherever you like (presumably one has to set the QGIS CRS correctly first)

Useful references:
https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/docs/s … ritain.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_gri … nce_system with links to useful pdfs
http://www.controlsurveys.ie/2013/11/12 … cator-itm/
and a well written background piece about Vice Counties at https://www.revolvy.com/main/index.php? … type=topic
Finally, the EEA resources are worth a look at http://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps# … taproducts
and http://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/ … e-grids-1/ and many useful articles like
Lillethun A., Cryan S., Jessen T. & Steenmans C. 2011. Map Colour Guide. .

I'm still looking for outlines of the Channel Isles that's better than the TDWG set
It's frustrating that the British Isles should be so difficult to assemble, I can throw France together in half an hour.

4

Re: Irish Watsonian Vice County boundaries

Since writing that I've read Rich Burkmar's account at http://www.tombio.uk/?q=dordogne-blog where he mentions the problems of locating good boundaries for France.
He came up with http://professionnels.ign.fr/geofla#tab-3 and I was referring to IGN's 2002 http://georezo.net/jparis/Data/ plus http://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/ … ce-grids-1 above.

5 (edited by charliebarnes 12-12-2016 09:51:00)

Re: Irish Watsonian Vice County boundaries

Darwyn Sumner wrote:

I don't know if this old enquiry was ever answered elsewhere

(yes - see http://forums.nbn.org.uk/viewtopic.php?pid=23709#p23709)

Charlie Barnes
Information Officer
Greater Lincolnshire Nature Partnership

6

Re: Irish Watsonian Vice County boundaries

Those OpenStreetMap & GitHub links oddly don't seem to operate properly. Copy the link and paste it into your search panel and they are found OK.

7

Re: Irish Watsonian Vice County boundaries

My R6 can't load the all-counties shp file - throws me "File not found" and then "unable to import". Has anyone come across that? My NI counties load fine.

Sam

8

Re: Irish Watsonian Vice County boundaries

Exactly which file were you trying to load.

Mike Weideli

9

Re: Irish Watsonian Vice County boundaries

Hi Mike,

Both All_Irish_Vice_Counties_irish_grid.shp and [...]wgs84.shp

The messages exactly are: "MS5 - Error: File not found" and "information - Unable to import sheet..."

Sam

10

Re: Irish Watsonian Vice County boundaries

I can't load it either into R6 or ArcGis. Message in ArcGis is can't open feature class. I am not sure what this means or what can be done to fix it.

Mike Weideli

11

Re: Irish Watsonian Vice County boundaries

Mike - it's a Christmas miracle - the shp file in the vice_counties_osie.zip works!! :D

https://github.com/SK53/Irish-Vice-Coun … s_osie.zip

Sam

12

Re: Irish Watsonian Vice County boundaries

Because it's free I'm using QGIS.
I'm just guessing but I think I figured out why the GitHub links act like Will-o-the-Whisps, OpenStreetMap stuff is continually being revised so new batches of data are similarly being uploaded (with different names, the date is usually part of the filename). The correct link will always be in the project, they save the data somewhere differently on GitHub every time they update (correct me if I'm wrong).
Some success with the Irish grid. Rich Burkmar told me that his OSGR tooll (part of the plugin set for QGIS entitled Tom.Bio tools which you can find detailed on FSC's Tomorrow's Biodiversity website and which is easy to install within QGIS) will create grid squares wherever you wish. Indeed that proved to be the case. In QGIS simply load up one or both of your layers for Ireland and set the Coordinate Reference System to OSNI 1952 / Irish National Grid EPSG:29901. Invoke Rich's OSGR tool and use it to create 100km square tiles which can then be saved as a .shp file. Repeat for 10km tiles.
Unfortunately these tiles aren't labelled - not a problem with the 100km tiles which can be done manually but a bit of a laborious task with the 10km tiles (if anyone can be bothered doing this I'd be glad of a copy).
Distribution maps can now be created using either of QGIS' Point in polygon or Join attributes by location methods using CSV outputs (from Recorder 6) which have Lat & Long fields.  Rich tells me that he's had enquiries about extending his TomBio toolset to Ireland - maybe one day.
I've no data to play with for Ireland, the millipede dataset from Colin Fairhurst I was playing with in the 1980s has long disappeared into media which can't be read any more. I would be grateful if anyone would be kind enough to let me have a CSV file of mixed taxa with Lat Long showing varied distribution across Ireland, any taxa will do  (https://www.researchgate.net/project/Eu … ogeography)

13 (edited by stevemcbill 15-03-2020 11:47:12)

Re: Irish Watsonian Vice County boundaries

Darwyn (or anyone else),

I have tried downloading and unzipping the Irish Vice Counties from GitHub (as noted in the discussion thread on NBN Forum/Mapping - https://forums.nbn.org.uk/viewtopic.php?id=2255) and have then loaded them one by one into QGIS 3.8.3 (Zanzibar) in order to save them out as KML files - all works well except for a few of the files extracted from the zip.  The ones not working (i.e. will not load into QGIS give the error message: (Layer is not valid: The layer F:/Downloads/Irish-Vice-Counties-master/vice_counties/H07_South_Tipperary/H07_South_Tipperary_wgs84.geojson is not a valid layer and can not be added to the map.).

Can I ask if anyone has the following Irish Vice County boundaries which they could email (or WeTransfer) to me (steve.mcwilliam@btinternet.com):

H07, H12, H15, H16, H23, H25 and H31.

Many thanks for any help you can provide.

Cheers and take care.

Steve J. McWilliam

Steve J. McWilliam
www.rECOrd-LRC.co.uk
www.stevemcwilliam.co.uk/guitar/