Plant & Animal Genomes XIV Conference

January 14-18, 2006
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

Integrating DIVA-GIS Into The Generation Challenge Program (GCP) Platform

Reinhard Simon¹ , Magna Schmitt¹ , Luis Avila¹ , Edwin Rojas¹ , Isaiah Mukema² , Richard Bruskiewich² , Graham McLaren²

¹  International Potato Center, PO Box 1558, Lima 12, Peru

²  International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), Philippines

DIVA-GIS started out as a georeferencing tool at CIP (International Potato Center) in 1999 and was subsequently further developed in collaboration with IPGRI/SGRP. More functionality for the analysis of biodiversity and prediction of geographic plant species distributions was added. By 2003, DIVA had gained some popularity – but a major architectural overhaul was needed to assure further addition of functionality and allow collaboration with an open-source community. Integration into the GCP platform was made a major objective resulting in the choice of the Java-language for cross-platform compatibility.
DIVA-GIS has functionality for molecular marker in spatial context, quality control of georeferencing plant genebank accessions, biodiversity analysis, and prediction of crop distributions.