Earthquakes & tectonic plates on Selborne

The latest addition to Selborne is earthquake data. To be frankly honest: the relevance of this to a personal environmental data annotation website is only partly there but the data is out there, reliable, and easy to use. There are links in the menu that will add all earthquakes from the last hour, day, week & month. 

There are plenty of websites where said earthquake data can be watched. What I never recall seeing with it is data on plate tectonics. These I have also added. There are links for ridges, trenches, transforms and a link for all of them together. There is also a link to view all earthquakes of past week with plates. 

Another tiny addition is a link to show Vavilov's 'centres of origin', the regions where crop domestication is thought to have originated. I created this by drawing copying it on the map from a map provided by Wikipedia. You can do nice things like view these with the Steppe data from the terestrial ecoregion data and watch a historical pattern in action.

When viewed on its own you can see what each ridge, trench & transform is called.

quakes & plates

Agriculture & Steppe

Anthropocene plant biodiversity data added to Selborne

Recently I added some data on terrestrial ecoregions to Selborne. It was a valuable addition but the information it conveys is not instinctively recognizable from the ground. For instance: it groups The Netherlands into one ecoregion with large parts of Denmark, Germany, Belgium and France. I wouldn't dare to argue with its justness as a concept but, from the point of view of an individual mapping his personal environment, ecoregions are an abstraction to the point of uselessness. Especially from a Dutch perspective where the 'Mixed Atlantic Forest' that it is supposed to contain simply does not exist.

A welcome addition to Selborne therefore is the 'Plant Biodiversity in the Anthropocene' data provided by Erle Ellis & colleagues at the Laboratory for Anthropogenic Landscape Ecology. I blogged about this earlier.

The original shapefile converted to a 12.8Mb GeoJSON file which I divided in 6 separate files each containing the data for each of the ecozones that the file provides (Palearctic, Nearctic, Neotropics, Afrotropics, Indo-Malay, Australasia). I had to split the Paleartic file again into North and South to keep file-size modest. Each file is between 1 and 3 Mb and is loaded as a layer on top of the standard map. Find the links in the menu under the logo under the datasets header. Give your browser time to parse.

What is nice about the data is that a lot of information is given for each area/cell/hexagon. When you load the data it will not give you the immediate visual buzz that makes maps attractive, but once you hover over a cell 13 different types of information are displayed.


There is information on main land use, land cover and population density. But the real meat of the thing is in the data on native species richness, species loss, and invasive/introduced species. By comparing data for each cells you can get a good view on where the human hand has been most effective in changing the native plant composition. 

The best source for detailed information on the data is the original paper.

This is data that to me appears to describe the world in a way that would be clearly visible if you were at a given area. 

It is possible to look at this data using the different maps Selborne offers under the layer-menu. Sudden jumps in numbers (be they for population density, urbanity or species richness) between adjacent cells can sometimes be understood by viewing it with a  topographic or relief map at the background.


My personal motivation for doing Selborne was the desire for a tool that would allow me to track invasive plants in my own neighbourhood and novel ecosystem/anthropocene work was what inspired me. So I am very happy with the inclusion of this data.   

Citation: Ellis, E. C., E. C. Antill, and H. Kreft. 2012. All is not loss: plant biodiversity in the Anthropocene. PLoS ONE 7:e30535. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0030535.

Visit Selborne here, more info about Selborne here.

Terrestial Ecoregions on Selborne

Selborne is a website that allows users to log backyard observations of the natural world. But it also aims to couple these annotations with large scale environmental datasets on for instance ecology, land type, land use and pollution. The first addition to Selborne of such data is information on 'terrestial ecoregions' taken from data found on the website of the Nature Conservancy. You can find it in the menu that appears when you hover over the logo on the top-right of the screen.

Terrestrial: Pertaining to land.

Ecoregion: "Ecoregions cover relatively large areas of land or water, and contain characteristic, geographically distinct assemblages of natural communities and species. The biodiversity of flora, fauna and ecosystems that characterise an ecoregion tends to be distinct from that of other ecoregions."

There are a few caveats of a technical nature. The data covers the entire globe and this translates 108Mb of GeoJson (the dataformat used). A bit much for an online service and the obvious solution is to turn this data into tiles as has been done elsewhere. It is the sensible approach but I will leave it for another time. 

Instead I have opted to select data for a few areas: Europe, Scandinavia, Madagascar, the Steppes, Papua New Guinea/New Zealand and Ecuador. The smallest of these files is 400Kb (Madagascar), the largest over 4.5Mb (Ecuador). I have more files on my computer but load-time and bandwidth are issues that worry me. 

The approach of loading raw data has its downsides, but it also has its upsides: it has a lot of contour (it looks cool) and it is possible to convey more information. Hover over an area to see 3 different types of information. That is two types more than the data translated to tiles (read images) ever could.    

Let's look a few things of interest.

Iceland: the first image shows how it looks on the standard black and white map in Selborne. I was wondering if I was missing a bit of data but when selecting a different map I saw why data seemed to be missing: there was nothing there, just snow and ice. For all datasets applies that viewing them with different maps adds information. 


Ecuador is a small country with high mountains and high biodiversity. The map shows it but what shows it even more is file size: there is more MB needed for Europe then for the Europe and Scandinavia files combined. That in itself says something about biological and geographical richness. 

 The Netherlands has the same habitat types as large parts of Denmark, France, Belgium and Germany.  The next goal is to add data that is more fine-grained. 

Botany exercises the memory without improving the mind

To The Honourable Daines Barrington

Selborne, June 2, 1778.

Dear Sir,

The standing objection to botany has always been, that it is a pursuit that amuses the fancy and exercises the memory, without improving the mind or advancing any real knowledge: and where the science is carried no farther than a mere systematic classification, the charge is but too true. But the botanist that is desirous of wiping off this aspersion should be by no means content with a list of names; he should study plants philosophically, should investigate the laws of vegetation, should examine the powers and virtues of efficacious herbs, should promote their cultivation; and graft the gardener, the planter, and the husbandman, on the phytologist. Not that system is by any means to be thrown aside; without system the field of nature would be a pathless wilderness: but system should be subservient to, not the main object of, pursuit.

Vegetation is highly worthy of our attention; and in itself is of the utmost consequence to mankind, and productive of many of the greatest comforts and elegancies of life. To plants we owe timber, bread, beer, honey, wine, oil, linen, cotton, etc., what not only strengthens our hearts, and exhilarates our spirits, but what secures from inclemencies of weather and adorns our persons. Man, in his true state of nature, seems to be subsisted by spontaneous vegetation: in middle climes, where grasses prevail, he mixes some animal food with the produce of the field and garden: and it is towards the polar extremes only that, like his kindred bears and wolves, he gorges himself with flesh alone, and is driven, to what hunger has never been known to compel the very beasts, to prey on his own species.* (* See the late Voyages to the South-seas.)

The productions of vegetation have had a vast influence on the commerce of nations, and have been the great promoters of navigation, as may be seen in the articles of sugar, tea, tobacco, opium, ginseng, betel, paper, etc. As every climate has its peculiar produce, our natural wants bring on a mutual intercourse; so that by means of trade each distant part is supplied with the growth of every latitude. But, without the knowledge of plants and their culture, we must have been content with our hips and haws, without enjoying the delicate fruits of India and the salutiferous drugs of Peru.

Instead of examining the minute distinctions of every various species of each obscure genus, the botanist should endeavour to make himself acquainted with those that are useful. You shall see a man readily ascertain every herb of the field, yet hardly know wheat from barley, or at least one sort of wheat or barley from another.

But of all sorts of vegetation the grasses seem to be most neglected; neither the farmer nor the grazier seem to distinguish the annual from the perennial, the hardy from the tender, nor the succulent and nutritive from the dry and juiceless.

The study of grasses would be of great consequence to a northerly and grazing kingdom. The botanist that could improve the sward of the district where he lived would be an useful member of society; to raise a thick turf on a naked soil would be worth volumes of systematic knowledge; and he would be the best commonwealth's man that could occasion the growth of 'two blades of grass where one alone was seen before.'

I am, etc.

An untypical letter from Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne (1789). Richard Mabey's biography paints White as an amiable country dumpling, a landlord with little land, a prospected vicar who never managed to become one, a man who arranged his financial security with a few miserly tricks: the portrait of a minor caricature in a Jane Austen novel. White travelled throughout Britain but in the end preferred to stay home, tend his garden and study the plants and birds around Selborne the village where he was born and where he died. The special contribution of his History is that he is the first one to dwell on the simple, mundane things in nature without apology and with complete relish. His book, he wrote only one, is reminding us that we do not see anything out of the ordinary, we already see so much. To use the phrase of Robert Walser.

Earlier posts on Richard Mabey include posts on his forage guide, and his journeys through wasteland ecology.