History
The earliest published mapping of biodiversity in the form of an atlas was completed for the flora of Britain - Atlas of the British Flora (1962) The first bird atlas, the Atlas of breeding birds of the West Midlands, covered Staffordshire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire and was published by Collins for the West Midland Bird Club, in 1970., It built on work done by the Club and its subsequent president, Tony Norris, for its West Midland Bird Distribution Survey, circulated privately in 1951, which mapped frequency of sightings and breeding densities against districts based on the boundaries of Rural District Councils.
The West Midlands atlas influenced and was followed by the 1976 Atlas of Breeding Birds in Britain and Ireland. In the decades that followed a number of atlases have been made all over the world and by 2008 atlases had summarised as many as 27.9 million records of birds gathered by at least 108000 contributors, over an area covering roughly 31.4% of the world's land. While early atlases focused on merely presence or absence of species, and their breeding, there is an increasing trend towards those that indicate abundance or relative abundance.
Read more about this topic: Bird Atlas
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“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“To history therefore I must refer for answer, in which it would be an unhappy passage indeed, which should shew by what fatal indulgence of subordinate views and passions, a contest for an atom had defeated well founded prospects of giving liberty to half the globe.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“It would be naive to think that peace and justice can be achieved easily. No set of rules or study of history will automatically resolve the problems.... However, with faith and perseverance,... complex problems in the past have been resolved in our search for justice and peace. They can be resolved in the future, provided, of course, that we can think of five new ways to measure the height of a tall building by using a barometer.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)