Quality issues in georeferencing: From physical collections to digital data repositories for ecological research

Arnald Marcer,Dominik Röpert,Mathias Dillen,David Fichtmüller,Tim Robertson,Nicky Nicolson,Elspeth Haston,Quentin Groom,Arthur D Chapman,Francesc Uribe,Torkild Bakken,Arturo H Ariño,Sarah Phillips,Joaquim Santos,Marcus Ernst,Agustí Escobar,Laurence Livermore,John Waller,Jack Plummer,Heimo Rainer,Deborah Paul,Kaloust Paragamian,Paul Braun,Lars Pettersson ,Isabel Rey Madeira ,John Wieczorek

doi:10.1111/ddi.13208

Abstract

AbstractNatural history collections constitute an enormous wealth of information of Life on Earth. It is estimated that over 2 billion specimens are preserved at institutions worldwide, of which less than 10% are accessible via biodiversity data aggregators such as GBIF. Moreover, they are a very important resource for eco‐evolutionary research, which greatly depends on knowing the precise location where the specimens were collected in order to characterize the environment in which they lived. Yet, only about 55% of the accessible records are georeferenced and only 31% have coordinate uncertainty information, which is critical for conducting rigorous studies. The awareness of this gap of knowledge which hinders the enormous potential of such data in research led to the organization of a workshop which brought together key players in georeferencing of natural history collections. The discussion and outcomes of this workshop are here presented.

Highlights

: 1. What are the reasons why despite the existence of quality guidelines, protocols and tools and the investment of resources on georeferencing, georeferencing data on final public repositories, mainly GBIF, is not of sufficient quality for research purposes
The workshop consisted of 4 morning and afternoon sessions spread over 3 consecutive days
Arturo’s talk dealt with the importance of locational data in ecological research, i.e., the ecologists’ need for georeferencing of NHC to establish a link between organisms and the environment they live in. He illustrated this with some ecological studies from the literature in different areas of ecology, e.g. pollination, mosquito richness, climate-change driven migrations, fisheries, etc

Summary

What actions can be taken to solve this situation?

The workshop consisted of 4 morning and afternoon sessions spread over 3 consecutive days (see planned agenda). Torkild made emphasis on the balance between the need to both follow standard guidelines and procedures and being pragmatic at the same time He mentioned several key points which affect the quality of georeferencing: the handling of old site names and changes in the administrative organisation, the use of supplementary information such as field notes to improve accuracy, the use of centroids for vaguely defined sites, the lack of technical knowledge on georeferencing, the need for having a user handbook, keeping the verbatim locality and, being aware of the right number of decimal places which are necessary for any given degree of accuracy.

The importance of location data in ecological research Presenter

Innovative methodologies to approach locational data quality issues Presenter

Findings

Case 1