Digital maps

Imagine spending 30 years legally responsible for a habitat boundary that was drawn on the wrong piece of land. And I don't mean wrong by a field or two. We're talking wrong because the data underlying the map was never accurate to begin with. It's things like this that make me sit bolt upright at 3 am, sweating like plums wrapped in a polythene bag.

One of the biggest misconceptions in ecology I come across is the notion that finding reliable GIS data is hard. If that’s what you think, you might want to look away now: I disagree. What is hard, however, is knowing whether the data you've found is actually any good.