[GRASS-user] WDPA vector files

[Thomas, Timothy (IFPRI)]

Thanks for your advice!

This is a dirty dataset.  I was hoping I had taken care of most of the problems, by breaking apart the dataset into IUCN categories.  It is common for one protected area to have several different designations.  It could be a national park and a national forest, for example.  However, apart from that, there are the unintended overlaps, which is something the makers of the shapefile could clean.

We loaded GRASS70 yesterday.  I tried to run this morning, and my Linux terminal is completely frozen.  I can't even close the window.  So I am waiting for my colleague, who is a Linux guru, to get to work and get me unfrozen so I can try again...

   Tim

***************************************************************
Timothy S. Thomas, Research Fellow, IFPRI
t.s.thomas at cgiar.org       +1-202-862-4605     skype: timothy.s.thomas      Rm 5035



-----Original Message-----
From: Markus Metz [mailto:markus.metz.giswork at googlemail.com] 
Sent: Friday, September 17, 2010 3:56 AM
To: Thomas, Timothy (IFPRI)
Cc: grass-user at lists.osgeo.org; Hamish
Subject: Re: [GRASS-user] WDPA vector files

Hamish wrote:
> Tim wrote:
>> I need to make some graphics showing WDPA protected areas.
>> I am trying to import each IUCN type as a separate layer, from shapefile
>> format.
>>  have only done 3 of the 8, and each is taking between 24 and 48 hours.
>> I am running out of time.  Does anyone already have these in GRASS format
>> and would be willing to share?  Thanks!
>
> you are probably running into the old "Florida Coastline" problem.
> M.Metz: did you do something to improve this in trunk?

No, I tried to optimize the cleaning functions in general.
>
>
> in a pinch you might try the v.in.ogr -c flag,
>
>  -c   Do not clean polygons (not recommended)
>
> but as it says, it's really not recommended to work with uncleaned data.

In this particular case, it might be ok not to clean polygons because
most protected areas are isolated, i.e. not bordering other protected
areas. OTOH, this dataset is also not really clean, I found that
protected areas that are supposed to be adjacent are overlapping each
other. You can try importing with the -c flag (also try the -r flag or
spatial=W,S,E,N), but you should validate the delineation of the
protected areas of interest.

Markus M