The leaf and stem mines of British flies and other insects – Use of iframes to embed NBN grid maps
Inspired by an article in the NBN News some time ago, I embedded NBN Grid Maps in ‘The leaf and stem mines of British flies and other insects' website using iframes.
Background
The British fauna includes about 900 species of leaf, stem, twig, bark and samara miner in the insect orders Diptera (flies), Coleoptera (beetles), Hymenoptera (sawflies) and Lepidoptera (moths).
The website includes keys for the identification of the mines of 484 of host plant genera, although for 119 of these host plant genera the keys to ‘Diptera’ and ‘non-Diptera’ are separate. No keys for the identification of the mines are included for the 354 remaining host plant genera, as although they may include miners elsewhere, they either do not occur in Britain, they are treated elsewhere under a different name or no miners are recorded on them in Britain.
Checklists are provided for all insect species discussed. Checklists by scientific and common name (where they exist) are given for all host plant genera.
The synonymy and known host plants, biology and distribution, where known, are given for all species, along with a list of known parasitoids, particularly chalcidoids (parasitoid waps).
Galleries now exist for a total of 1,006 species (36 species of beetles, 473 species of flies, 469 species of moths and 28 species of sawflies), although not all are miners. These images are mainly sourced from Bladmineerders van Europa and British Leafminers, but include some originals taken by Brian Pitkin and others.
Links, where they exist, are included to species accounts in Bladmineerders van Europa (formerly Nederlandse bladmineerders), British Leafminers and UKMoths. Links for all species are given to the Biodiversity Heritage Library, Encyclopedia of Life, Fauna Europaea (including distribution lists by country), National Biodiversity Network (including distribution maps), the Universal Chalcidoid Database, Google, Google Scholar and Google Images.
Full-colour images of host plants are provided for 195 of the host plant genera, although not all are known host plants of miners in Britain. Links from 166 of the included host plant species to the Botanical Society of the British Isles (BSBI) Map Scheme (formerly Atlas Update Project) are provided, showing their hectad distribution.
The NBN Grid maps
The process of embedding NBN Grid Maps was fully described in the NBN Newsletter (and information can be found by clicking here) so I haven’t repeated it. However, I recently updated my website to XHTML 1.0 and replaced the text menu to a drop down menu using CSS3’, free menu maker (http://css3menu.com/?gclid=CLPrmYCA1a8CFVASfAod9DYfew). In the process I discovered that any ampersands used in the links to NBN Grid maps and other URL’s used on the website had to be edited from ‘&’ to ‘&’ in order to meet the requirements of W3C’s Markup Validation Service (http://validator.w3.org/). The NBN server and other servers interpret ‘&’ as ‘&’ in requests for services.
Use of NBN Grid maps
I have embedded NBN Grid maps (where they exist) for all British insect miners as well as listing the Watsonian Vice Counties for all publicly available records. The embedded NBN Grid maps include a link to open the NBN Interactive Distribution map
In addition to embedding NBN Grid maps for miners I have included links to the NBN Interactive Distribution maps for all host plant species. This facilitates comparison of a miner’s distribution with that of its host or hosts. For those miners which are only recorded on one host plant genus I have embedded NBN Grid maps for both miner and host plant. In those cases where no NBN Grid map exists for a miner but one or more NBN Grid maps exist for its known hosts, the potential range of a miner can be determined.
The only slight drawback to embedding the NBN Grid maps is that the NBN service to generate the maps is sometimes unavailable, particularly over weekends. The space allocated for each Grid map is replaced by a message warning the user that the service is not available. This is outweighed by the advantage of embedding the maps, which are created on the fly from the most recently available distribution data, and means I don’t need to update distribution maps on my website every time new relevant records are added to NBN Gateway.
Written by Brian Pitkin
Paul Gilberston, NBN Gateway developer comments as follows: “The NBN Gateway services are provided on a best effort basis. We are looking into making the map services more robust, and with the database changes coming with the new access controls, we will improve reliability.”