Interactive maps for visualizing geographic distributions and phenotypes

Abstract

Museum databasing initiatives have resulted in the release of large amounts of geographic locality data for a wide range of plants and animals. Species lists with images of type specimens are also increasingly available online. For specialists working with a particular group, it would be helpful to connect these phenotypic and geographic data within a single interactive interface that can be easily updated following taxonomic changes or the discovery of new taxa. Here, we present interactive web-maps for Heliconius butterflies and allies, together with a portal for downloading the underlying specimen and locality data. The maps and portal can be viewed here: https://heliconius-maps.github.io. The code and software underlying these maps are all open source, and the website is hosted for free by the GitHub servers. It should be straightforward for researchers to adapt our methods to their own taxa of interest.