GeoPick: Georeferencing Made Easy

Biodiversity Information Science and Standards

article

Arnald Marcer¹  Agustí Escobar¹  Arthur D Chapman²  John Richard Wieczorek³ 

[1] CREAF;Australian Biodiversity Information Services;VertNet;University of California

关键词: natural history collections;    Darwin Core standard;    best practices;    web application;    uncertainty;   

DOI  :  10.3897/biss.7.111036

来源: Pensoft

【 摘 要 】

GeoPick is a new web application aimed at providing a simple yet powerful georeferencing tool to the natural history collections community (Fig. 1). Its conceptual foundation is based on the Georeferencing Best Practices by Chapman and Wieczorek (2020), whose guidelines it intends to implement. GeoPick also provides a close and direct relation between the tool’s output and the Darwin Core standard (Wieczorek et al. 2012).  In the past two decades, institutions across the world have devoted significant resources to digitise their collections and bring them closer to their final users (Nelson and Ellis 2018), i.e., the research, conservation and education communities, and to the general public. Georeferencing is an important part of the digitisation process (Nelson et al. 2012). It provides the link between the preserved specimen and the natural habitat where it lived (Bloom et al. 2017). However, there is a gap between the data that have already been digitised and made accessible through public repositories such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and the expected fully georeferenced information, including crucial information on coordinate uncertainty and precision, which is needed to conduct rigorous studies based upon digitised specimens (Marcer et al. 2022). In order to determine the reasons behind this mismatch between optimal and actual georeferenced data, we conducted a global survey on current georeferencing practices (Marcer et al. 2021a), which was used as the basis for discussion in a workshop organised by the MOBILISE Cost Action that took place in Warsaw (Poland) in 2020 (Marcer et al. 2020, Marcer et al. 2021a). Among other recommendations that came out of the workshop was the need to develop more user-friendly tools that help georeferencers follow standards and guidelines in a more effective way. According to the survey, only 16 percent of respondents used a specific georeferencing tool such as GeoLocate (Rios 2019), while the rest only used general tools (Google Maps/Earth was reported by 47% of the respondents). Moreover, about 75% of the respondents reported only following in-house ad hoc protocols or none at all. This discouraging situation and the need for a tool that is easy to use, yet effective, was discussed informally with attendees at the 2022 Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) and Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC) conferences.

【 授权许可】

Unknown