Description: Labels and names for specific layers, corresponding to datasets currently being displayed through other groups, as follows:
Data Access: See data access information for corresponding data layers.
Download Date: See download date for corresponding data layers.
Description: National capitals, department capitals, and municipal seats. Departments are "second-level" administrative units also known as provinces or cantons in different countries. Dataset obtained from CCAD, the Central American Commission for Environment and Development. Original CCAD dataset had incomplete and inconsistent attributes for determining national and department capitals; this determination and attribution was performed by the CAEE group. The CAEE group also combined datasets obtained from the CCAD site and SERVIR MESOSTOR (see below) in order to compile a uniform file covering the seven Central American countries.
Data Access: ESRI shapefiles obtained from the CCAD GIS data base page ("Centros Poblados"/"Cabeceras Municipales", by country) and the SERVIR MESOTOR site (all countries, but with data gaps). Sites from Mexico were removed by the CAEE group in order to simplify the dataset for CAEE-Mapache use.
Download Date: 2004-6 to 2005-6
Description: Populated sites from the USA National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's GEOnet Names Server (GNS). From their site: "Toponymic information is based on the Geographic Names Data Base, containing official standard names approved by the United States Board on Geographic Names and maintained by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency". This global gazetteer includes center point locations for a diverse set of sites, including administrative regions (countries, second-level administrative units, etc), natural features (lakes, mountains, etc), transportation features, populated places, etc. However, some information may be out of date or redundant. The same site may be represented with multiple spellings (some valid, some incorrect) or in more than one location. To simplify the presentation, the CAEE group selected only "populated places" (FC (Feature Classification) = P) and grouped all sites with identical latitude and longitude, selecting only the "last" place name at each location from an alphabetically sorted list; this simplification by location reduced the number of populated places in Central America from 44,185 to 27,306. The location was also corrected for one place. For Central America, location errors appear to be as large as 5 to 10 kilometers.
Data Access: Text files by country downloaded from the GEOnet Names Server, for the seven Central American countries.
Download Date: 2005-10
Description: Administrative Divisions of Latin America to the third order, Version 1.1 (April 1997), from CIAT (Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical / International Center for Tropical Agriculture). The following statements have been extracted and compiled from the CIAT documentation: "The information compiled in this coverage comes from geographic information from maps of administrative units that we digitized country by country, corrected, and adjusted with the digital information of the Digital Chart of the World (DCW). The information is represented at two levels of administrative units: the first corresponds to 'Estados', 'Provincias', 'Departamentos', or 'Distritos' according to the denomination of this level in each country, and the second corresponds to 'Municipios', 'Provincias', or 'Cantones'. Source maps were obtained from each country to digitize this information but in some cases it is out of date and the administrative divisions have changed greatly in recent years. This dataset is made available freely as is in the public domain." This dataset should be referenced as follows: "Jones, P. G. and Bell, W. C. (1997) Coverage of Latin America Administrative Divisions. Version 1.1 Apr 1997 digital dataset. CIAT Cali Colombia." Some boundaries may be out of date; also, there appears to be a small distortion in the dataset as a whole, such that these boundaries have geographical distortions when compared to datasets from other sources. The following political boundaries are displayed:
Data Access: An ArcInfo GIS coverage for Latin America was included in the SOTERLAC dataset, obtained from FAO as a CD-ROM. The entire SOTERLAC dataset may be downloaded from this ISRIC site. CIAT datasets may be searched and obtained on the CIAT site. Boundaries for the seven Central American nations were extracted from the Latin American dataset for CAEE-Mapache use, and converted to ESRI shapefiles. Small corrections were made to the administrative units, especially for Nicaragua.
Download Date: Early 1999
Description: World Database of Protected Areas, version 2005. From the WDPA Disclaimer: "The central World Database on Protected Areas is kept at the UNEP-World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC) and is updated continuously providing the most current data on protected areas worldwide. The following link gives you access to this database: http://www.unep-wcmc.org/parks/index.html." This is a global-scale dataset resulting from a wide collaboration between international, national, and non-governmental entities. It is intended for use at a scale of 1:1,000,000. Three different layers are distributed and shown on Mapache:
Data Access: The WDPA files are distributed as a single zipped file from the WDPA web site; ESRI shapefiles (global extent, one layer per shape file) are included in the zip file. Data for the seven Central American countries was extracted from this global dataset for use in CAEE-Mapache applications. Additional information about this dataset may be obtained from the following pages: UNEP-WCMD Protected Areas and World Heritage; IUCN - World Commission on Protected Areas; and IUCN - World Commission on Protected Areas, Collaboration Portal. Be warned that there seems to be a lot of redundancy among these sites.
Download Date: 2005-4
Description: CCAD-World Bank Mesoamerican Ecosystems Map (2003 revision). CCAD is the Central American Commission for Environment and Development. This ecosystem map of the seven Central American nations was developed under the leadership of the World Bank and CCAD, largely to support the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor efforts. It is based on Landsat satellite data from 1997-1999, validated by national teams of experts. The final report document can be obtained from the World Bank Central American page. The UNESCO physiognomic/ecological classification system was used. For convenient display, individual ecosystem classes are aggregated as follows:
Data Access: ESRI shapefiles (by country) obtained from the CCAD GIS data base page. Additional information about this dataset may be obtained from the following specific project pages: World Bank; the United States Geological Survey (USGS); and the World Institute for Conservation & Environment (WICE). Shape file from Costa Rica had to be reprocessed in order to make it consistent with shape files from the other countries (individual polygons representing the same ecosystem unit were merged into "multi-polygons").
Download Date: Approximately 2005-1
Description: University of Maryland (College Park) Global 1-km Land Cover Classification. Data acquired during 1992-1993 from the NOAA-AVHRR remote sensing instrument at 1-km resolution. For convenient display, original UMD land cover classes are aggregated as follows:
Data Access: Raster files (global scale) obtained from the University of Maryland 1-km Global Land Cover site. This global dataset was clipped to Central America for use in CAEE-Mapache applications.
Download Date: 1999-5.
Description: True-color satellite imagery from the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) instrument onboard the NASA Terra platform. 2004 daily imagery was processed to create monthly global composites where clouds have been removed, showing seasonal changes in the land surface (vegetation greenness, ice cover, etc). Produced by NASA's Earth Observatory and distributed as an OGC Web Map Service (see below) by the JPL (Jet Propulsion Lab) OnEarth site. See this NASA Earth Observatory page and this article for more details about the Blue Marble project. Image pixel resolution is approximately 500 meters. Imagery shown includes topographic hillshading on land and bathymetric color shading on the oceans.
Data Access: Live imagery accessed via Open Geospatial Consortium Web Map Service (OGC WMS); see also this article for information about OGC and its web service specifications, including WMS. JPL WMS Capabilities Request: http://wms.jpl.nasa.gov/wms.cgi?request=GetCapabilities. Layer used: BMNG (April and November). Data files may be obtained from the NASA Earth Observatory page.
Download Date: Real-time data access; imagery was collected in 2004.
Description: Landsat 7 15-meter pan-sharpened satellite imagery from the JPL (Jet Propulsion Lab) OnEarth site; also known as the "WMS Global Mosaic". From the JPL site: "a high resolution global image mosaic of the earth, produced from more than 8200 individual Landsat 7 scenes. Each scene requires more than 500MB of storage, or about one standard CD. These images have been collected during 1999-2003. The highest resolution image has a ground relative resolution of 15 meters, or 50 foot. The mosaic contains all nine spectral bands of the Landsat7 ETM+ instrument". Additional metadata (in XML) from JPL may be found here.
Data Access: Live imagery accessed via Open Geospatial Consortium Web Map Service (OGC WMS); see also this article for information about OGC and its web service specifications, including WMS. JPL WMS Capabilities Request: http://wms.jpl.nasa.gov/wms.cgi?request=GetCapabilities. Layer used: global_mosaic.
Download Date: Real-time data access; imagery was collected between 1999 and 2003.
Description: Shaded relief created from the SRTM30 1-km DEM dataset. Documentation for this layer is not available. See these links (1 and 2) for additional information about SRTM30.
Data Access: Information not available at this time.
Download Date: Information not available at this time.
Description: Major elevation ranges in Central America, extracted from the GTOPO30 global 1-kilometer resolution digital elevation model (DEM). These elevation ranges roughly parallel major gradients in climate and natural ecosystems in the region. The four ranges created by CAEE for display in Mapache are:
Data Access: Raster files (global scale) obtained from the USGS GTOPO30 site. This global dataset is distributed in regional tiles. The tile encompassing Central America was clipped to Central America for use in CAEE-Mapache applications.
Download Date: 1998-10.
Description: Daily satellite imagery from the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) instruments onboard the NASA Terra and Aqua platforms. True-color Mesoamerican imagery is processed for the NASA SERVIR project by the MODIS Rapid Response System, and distributed as an OGC Web Map Service (see below) by the JPL (Jet Propulsion Lab) OnEarth site. The Terra spacecraft takes multispectral images daily over a region at about 10:30am local mean solar time, while the Aqua spacecraft crosses over the same region at about 1:30pm. The JPL OnEarth site updates its imagery archive every day at around 1200Z with images taken the previous day. Image pixel resolution is approximately 250 meters.
Data Access: Live, daily upated imagery accessed via Open Geospatial Consortium Web Map Service (OGC WMS); see also this article for information about OGC and its web service specifications, including WMS. JPL WMS Capabilities Request: http://wms.jpl.nasa.gov/wms.cgi?request=GetCapabilities. Layers used: daily_terra and daily_aqua.
Download Date: Real-time data access based on imagery from the previous day.