CassiopeaMap was designed to be a resource for the Cassiopea community to help visualize where Cassiopea populations are being observed worldwide. The inspiration for this map came from wanting an easier way to identify good sampling sites for Cassiopea.
The map combines community scientist observations from iNaturalist, historical observations from the Cassiopea literature, and sampling sites contributed by the research community. This map will become more comprehensive the more people who contribute to the sampling site data, so please consider adding your sites (see details below).
Exploring CassiopeaMap
Sampling Site Data (Red Diamond): Sampling sites are collected from Cassiopea researchers (that’s you) who have provided information on locations where they have observed or sampled Cassiopea. If you would like to contribute your own sites to this map please fill out this google form: https://forms.gle/AbWngy8Jpyzrekc19. Click on the red diamonds on the map to get a sense of what information you will need to provide.
iNaturalist Data (Green Circle): The iNaturalist data includes all observations of the Genus Cassiopea worldwide. Click on the green dots to access the metadata and data summaries. iNaturalist points are clustered together with graphs and summaries of the aggregated points. iNaturalist data is updated once a year on January 1st.
Cassiopea Literature (Blue Square): A curated list of Cassiopea observations from published literature. This data was gathered by Colin Anthony for the publication “Leveraging Public Data to Predict Global Niches and Distributions of Rhizostome Jellyfishes“. These include 116 locations from 47 publications dated to 2022.
Navigation Tools
The Filter Tool – Filter the data by Cassiopea species, date observed, and a few other options.
The Search Bar – Look up specific species, locations, and papers. Above the search bar
The Measurement Tool – Provides specific coordinates of a location.
This map was created by Myles Wagner as a PhD student in the Strader Lab at Texas A&M. Feel free to reach out to [email protected] with any questions or suggestions.