DIVA-GIS | free, simple & effective

DIVA-GIS is a free computer program for mapping and geographic data analysis (a geographic information system (GIS). With DIVA-GIS you can make maps of the world, or of a very small area, using, for example, state boundaries, rivers, a satellite image, and the locations of sites where an animal species was observed. We also provide free spatial data for the whole world that you can use in DIVA-GIS or other programs.

You can download the program and read the documentation.

DIVA-GIS is particularly useful for mapping and analyzing biodiversity data, such as the distribution of species, or other ‘point-distributions’. It reads and write standard data formats such as ESRI shapefiles, so interoperability is not a problem. DIVA-GIS runs on Windows only.

You can use the program to analyze data, for example by making grid (raster) maps of the distribution of biological diversity, to find areas that have high, low, or complementary levels of diversity. And you can also map and query climate data. You can predict species distributions using the BIOCLIM or DOMAIN models.