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File format


The coordinate reference system is latitude/longitude and theWGS84 datum.

File Formats


A "shapefile" consist of at least three actual files. This is a commonly used format that can be directly used in Arc-anything, DIVA-GIS, and many other programs. Unfortunately, non-latin characters are garbled.

An "ESRI geodatabase" is an MS Access fole that can be opened in ArcGIS (an expensive but powerful program). One of its advantages, compared to a shapefile, is that it can store non-latin characters (e.g. Cyrillic and Chinese characters).

A "Google Earth .kmz" file can be opened in Google Earth.

A "RData" file can be used in R (with the sp package loaded)

Some files have been compressed and grouped in ZIP files. You can use programs such as 7-zip, PKZIP or StuffIt to decompress the files.