suggest to add support for mapping names to distribution maps

[jhpoelen]

as discussed with @n8upham

New maps aligned to HMW vol 9, CMW, MDD v1.2 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jbi.14330 (neat!) MDD v1.2 maps on Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/record/6644198#.YysjfSHMKEu HMW maps on Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/record/6647781#.YystdSHMJER

[n8upham]

Awesome -- yeah here's some possible ideas:

• download those range maps for a given taxonomy, say MDD v1.2 (from Sept 2020) -- could start with just Chiroptera as a test case: https://zenodo.org/record/6644198#.YysjfSHMKEu
• the maps are in geopackage (GPG) format, so need to be read into memory somehow (I use QGIS or R) but bash tools like GDAL are at the heart of these (fuinctions like ogrinfo, e.g., https://tereshenkov.wordpress.com/2018/11/05/handy-bash-scripts-to-run-ogr-command-line-tools/)
• convert the range maps to a raster grid of given size -- I'd suggest an equal-area grid of 1-degree latitude and longitude at the equator, since this is known to be about the reliable resolution of expert range maps (e.g., see Hurlbert and Jetz 2007: https://www.pnas.org/content/104/33/13384)
• with those rasterized maps per species, develop a way to link the names to maps and then allow querying of any given geocoordinate -- e.g., 33.412778, -111.943056 is Tempe AZ and you can find X list of mammal species ... or else ask the question "which species of Peromyscus are found near Tempe, AZ?" and get a list of species in that same grid cell. Could also help with alternative usages of the same name, but we'd have to think about that more

Thanks!