Georeferencing GBIF datasets

In this recipe, we will work with the geo-referenced data from the GBIF dataset. We will take this opportunity to look at how to interface Python with OpenStreetMap (https://www.openstreetmap.org ), a freely available mapping service. We will also use a Python image processing library called Pillow (http://python-pillow.github.io/), which is based on PIL. You may want to read a little bit about both before starting. Tile Map Services (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/TMS) is quite an important concept to get a basic grasp of. The GBIF and OpenStreetMap tiles are available behind REST services.

In our example, we will try to extract information from GBIF using the geographic coordinates of the Galápagos archipelago.

Getting ready

You will need to install Pillow by using conda install pillow or pip install pillow.

You can find this content in the Chapter10/GBIF_extra.ipynb Notebook.

How to do it...

Let's take a look at the following steps:

1. First, let's define a function...