This repository contains GeoJSON files for the four different levels of the World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distribution. This is a TDWG standard, see World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD). The repository for the standard details the history of this recording scheme, and GeoJSON files for each of the four geographic levels. I originally made those GeoJSON from GIS files retrieved from a Kew website that is now defunct (see rdmpage/prior-standards for details). The licensing of those files is unclear, which may limit their utility. Progress on the TDWG standard seems uncertain, so I’ve created this repository so that anyone wanting to use these regions with an open license can do so.
The RBGKew/powop repository for Plants of the World Online has a AGPL-3.0 license. In this repository there is a MySQL dump of the World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions. I have downloaded that file, created a MySQL database, extracted the plant regions in Well-known text (WKT) and used ogr2ogr to generate GeoJSON for each region. These files (and any code I have authored in this repository) is also available under the terms of the AGPL-3.0 license.
The key steps for converting WKT to GeoJSON are described in this answer to a question on GIS StackExchange.
To generate GeoJSON files to display on the web we need to convert between the Spatial reference system used in the MySQL database and that used by web viewers. The MySQL data uses EPSG:3857, the GeoJSON files use EPSG:4326. Hence when converting WKT to GeoJSON using ogr2ogr we need the options -s_srs EPSG:3857 -t_srs EPSG:4326.
We also need the flag -lco RFC7946=YES to ensure they follow the “right-had rule” in The GeoJSON Format RFC7946. This avoids errors when using tools such as GeoJSONLint.
The GeoJSON files have been generated with one file per region, and files for each level have been stored in the corresponding folder (level1, level2, etc.). The GeoJSON output from ogr2ogr as been formatted using PHP json_encode and has the code and name for the corresponding regions included as feature properties.
The file paths.json has an associative array listing each the files in each level by their code, making it easier to find a file from its level-specific code.
The websites geojson.io and GeoJSONLint are good places to view GeoJSON files. GitHub also has built-in GeoJSON viewing for smaller files, which you can see here, for example.