Help; IDnature Guides; Global Mapper; 20q; 20m

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Global Mapper
The Global Mapper is provided through a technical partnership between The Polistes Corporation and Topozone.com. Topozone provides base maps and aerial photographs from servers in Massachusetts using a total of approximately 20 terabytes of data. These include 1:1,000,000 scale maps of the world, 17 million topographical maps to 1:25,000 scale of the United States, and aerial photographs at 1 meter resolution covering 89% of the United States. Using Discover Life's servers, Polistes integrates distributional data onto these from participating databases, such as Missouri Botanical Garden's. In 2003, Sun Microsystems, Inc., gave The Polistes Foundation a generous equipment grant that included 10 processors to help Discover Life expand its network and serve its users from the University of Georgia and Missouri Botanical Garden, in North America, and the Agricultural Research Council, in Southern Africa. We seek additional partners to add more maps, photographs, databases, and regional servers to Discover Life.

Browser requirements
The Global Mapper and Discover Life's reporting tool require your browser to support ISMAP. They work on all recent versions of Internet Explorer, Netscape, and Mozilla, except for Netscape version 4.79 on Mac's. Click here for more details and how to upgrade your browser.

Crediting images and records:
Create a file called /home/IM/db/$agent/README to credit images and allow users to send feedback to data providers. The README file has the following lines:

Formatting images to import:
Images must be formatted as a JPEG with file extension being in lowercase and the filename containing the $agent and a unique identifier (eg. I_SB98.jpg). If you can't rename your images with the $agent, we can do that for you, but you will have to assign a unique identifier to each image in the file name.

Scientific names

Discover Life and its partners now manage over 1.18 million valid scientific names on-line. These are associated with over 10,000 family names that are part of our Tree of Life, which is based on The National Science Foundation's Assembling the Tree of Life project. They can also be accessed via our search box and by browsing All Living Things .

We encourage taxonomists to contact us and use our tools to contribute and manage their scientific names, authorities, synonyms, references, and associated biological information.

Using the same valid scientific name across databases is essential to our collective efforts to link checklists, identification guides, photographs, catalogs, specimen records, maps, and other information into pages on species and higher taxa. Here are the rules that we follow in sharing names across databases.

NO ACCENTS -- Letters in scientific names are restricted to Latin A-Z and a-z. Although we support accents in authority names, references, and elsewhere on Discover Life (see accents & symbols), our scientific names never have accented characters.
DATA STOREAGE VARIABLES -- We use up to three variables to STORE valid scientific names. These variables are $name, $morph, and $sex. We use an additional variable, $common_name, to store other names, such as synonyms, alternative spellings, and vernacular names in different languages. We separate multiple synonyms and other names with semicolons within the $common_name variable. We use the variable $authority to STORE the author (and possible year and page combination) that ties a $name to its scientific reference. We use a final variable, $level, to specify the level of a $name, e. g., species, genus, and family.
IMPORT VARIABLES -- To support the vast array of non-standard taxonomic databases, we do not require contributors to have their data in any particular format. We have a large number of translators that IMPORT data into the storage variables described above. For example, many taxonomists keep $genus and $species variables as separate columns in their spreadsheet and database tables. For species level names, our translators combine $genus and $species and store the binomial in $name, separating the genus and species with a space.
VALID HIGHER TAXA -- Valid genera and higher taxa always start with a capital A-Z and have one or more lowercase letters a-z. They contain no spaces or accents and are stored in $name.
NEW GENERA -- Unpublished, new genera start with the convention 'Gn_' (capital-G lowercase-n underscore) and then follow the rules of morphospecies below that try to separate them to a unique, temporary generic name.
VALID SPECIES -- A valid species name is a binomial with a valid genus and specific name. The specific name is all lowercase a-z but may include a hyphen '-', e. g., 'Smilax bona-nox'. There is a single space between the two names. It is stored in $name.
MORPHOSPECIES -- Morphospecies names are temporary, working names that are stored as binomials in $name. The second, specific name must start with 'sp_' (lowercase-s lowercase-p underscore) and be followed by a unique investigator-place-project-number combination that tries to distiguish it from other morphospecies but may fail to do so across databases, e. g., 'Rogas sp_Panama_3' or 'Rogas sp_UGCA_5'. Use underscores, not spaces to separate words. Put 'sp_' before 'cf', 'nr', 'n_sp', 'near' and other ways or describing morphospecies, e. g., use 'Jornandes sp_n_sp_from_chiapas' or 'Scalponotatus sp_nr_chilcotti_2'. We convert 'sp.' & 'spp.' either to just the genus name or to a morphospecies, e. g., sp_1 versus sp_2.
SUBSPECIES, VARIETIES, FORMA, AND HYBRIDS -- The variable $name links to a web page. It CANNOT be a trinomial with two spaces. You have two options to store information about subspecies, varieties and forma.
- Option-1 [preferred] -- use the $morph variable
  If we import the name of a subspecies, variety, etc. into the $morph variable, then it will be associated with the species page to which it is a member. There are on-line tools within the IDnature guides for managing information associated with the $morph and $sex variables.
- Option-2 -- append the third name after an underscore to the end of the $name variable
  This option separates the kind from its species and gives it a page under the genus.
  - Subspecies: use 'Genus species_subspecies', e. g., 'Wasmannia auropunctata_australis'.
  - Variety: use 'Genus alpha_var_beta'.
  - Forma: use 'Genus alpha_forma_beta'.
  - Hybrids: use 'Genus alpha_x_beta'.
HOMONYMS -- In the case of homonyms, as a temporary measure, we append '_homonym' to one $name to distiguish it from another taxon with the same name, e. g., Cepolidae and Cepolidae_homonym, which we use as fish and gastropod family names, respectively. Use '_homonym1', etc., if necessary.
TAXONOMIC AUTHORITY FILES -- Our taxonomic authority files associate species with higher taxa and take precedence over other information on names. Contributing taxonomists can import and manage these files with the IDnature guide (20q) software. The databases that manage images and maps use these authority files to associate species with higher taxa. They do not contribute to the authority files. BE WARNED that if a species is in a map database, it will NOT map as a member of a genus unless the species is also a member of the genus within an authority file. While this may seem inconvenient, it keeps a large number of spelling errors within map and image databases from creating bogus species within genera.
IMAGE TITLE -- We use an image 'title' variable to associate images with species pages. To do this, the title value should start with a valid scientific name. It may have additional information after a comma. For example, 'Solenopsis invicata, queen, head' will associate the image with Solenopsis invicta's species page, assuming that 'Solenopsis invicta' is in an authority file!