Comparing heterogeneous distribution maps for marine species

Automated comparison of heterogeneous geographical distribution maps detects statistical or punctual differences between these maps. The maps' contents are heterogeneous; they can differ in format, resolution and scale. In this paper, the comparison is applied to species distributions in geographic areas. We present an automatic procedure to compare distribution maps for marine species. The comparison calculates the similarities at two different granularities, a detailed one that relies on point-to-point comparisons and a more general one using Kappa statistic. Furthermore, our method compares global scale maps by applying a solution based on cloud computing. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by a practical use case and the efficiency by comparing it with a sequential computation. The method allows, for instance, marine biologists and fisheries managers to compare maps. The efficiency allows employing it in interactive systems that need to produce results in short time.