iucn-red-list-spatial-data

Converting IUCN Red List to GeoJSON

Download IUCN data

Once you have created an account at http://www.iucnredlist.org/ you can download data as shapefiles.

Converting to GeoJSON

For background see How to convert Shapefiles to GeoJSON maps for use on GitHub (and why you should) and Managing GeoJSON data using GDAL.

IUCN shapefiles can be big, and the resulting GeoJSON can be huge (for example, if a species distribution is based on geographic provinces, and the polygons follow those the geographical boundaries with a high degree of precision).

Install GDAL

On a Mac download precompiled GDAL from http://www.kyngchaos.com/software:frameworks and add

export PATH=/Library/Frameworks/GDAL.framework/Programs:$PATH

To .bash_profile

Convert one file

Simply use ogr2ogr:

ogr2ogr -f GeoJson species_13418.geojson species_13418.shp

Extract GeoJSON for one species from multi-species file

The GDAL utility ogr2ogr can be used to extract and simplify GeoJSON. For example, given the data for shrimps (FW_SHRIMP) we can extract data for Euryrhynchus amazoniensis like this:

ogr2ogr -f GeoJson Euryrhynchus_amazoniensis.geojson FW_SHRIMP.shp -sql "SELECT * FROM FW_SHRIMP WHERE binomial='Euryrhynchus amazoniensis'" -simplify 0.1

Note the use of -simplify 0.1 to simplify the polygon (without this the file is huge), and the SQL to extract just the data for one species (the species in the dataset are listed din the *.dbf file).