NERP TE Project Maps - Areas of research activity, tracks and sites (NERP TE 13.1, AIMS)

This dataset describes the areas of research activities for the 38 National Environmental Research Program Tropical Ecosystem (NERP TE) Hub projects. It represents the areas that have field work being conducted, where measurements have been taken and where modelling or analysis is being done.

It consists of three master shapefiles (points, lines and polygons) that capture the regions that are being studied by all these projects. These master shapefiles are also made available split by project.

The data contained in this dataset was compiled from June 2013 submissions from each of the NERP TE projects asking them to describe their areas being researched. They submitted this information in a range of formats including spreadsheet tables for site information (points) and bounding boxes, KMLs for study areas, transects and animal tracks (lines and polygons), raster files and for some simply a description of the region. All of these formats were converted, digitised or drawn into three shapefiles: one for points, one for polygons and one for lines. Each feature was given a description of the type of research or measurement that was being under taken at that location and a link to the associated project pages. Features were also classified to roughly group the type of research work being done at each location.

This data was originally intended to be part of the creation of detailed spatial data for the creation of metadata records describing each of the projects. It was also used for creating maps for each project. These maps are available for download and are available as WMS layers from the e-Atlas.

The polygon features from the various projects overlap significantly and thus many boundaries are hidden with default styling. The order of the features within the shapefile has been chosen so that at least some part of each polygon is visible when all polygons are shown.

This dataset is not a complete representation of the work being done by the NERP TE projects as it was collected only 2 years into a 3.5 year program. In addition to this some project have chosen to protect the exact location of sensitive sites and so have only provided coarse spatial information about the project.

This dataset will be updated periodically as more NERP TE data becomes available.