Interpreting and Georeferencing the Concept of “Near” in Biodiversity Records

Abstract

Georeferencing historical biodiversity specimens is a difficult but necessary task to bring data accumulated in the course of past scientific efforts into full currency for modern use. Textual locality descriptions vary widely, and are prone to error involved in interpretation of brief descriptions and often-unclear terms. Each type of locality description requires particular georeferencing methods to maximize precision and accuracy of resulting coordinates and uncertainty. Current “best practice” methods concerning textual descriptions referring to proximity to a locality (i.e., “near” a locality) are arbitrary, restrictive, or undefined. In this paper, I explore these challenges, and provide new methods for assigning geographic coordinates and uncertainty (with appropriate metadata) to such locality descriptions using point, line, or polygon shapes as the basis for Voronoi diagrams. Voronoi diagrams define the geographic space nearer to a given point than to any other point in a collection, making them ideally suited for determining the shape of such locality descriptions.