geographical coordinates and accuracy

[Panza, Robin]

However, while 50m may be significant to plants and sessile animals, it is
utterly meaningless to birds, so we'd have to have quite a range of distance
codes to be able to share them among taxa.  The kind of accuracy problem I
deal with is the specimen labelled "British East Africa", or "Pomerania".
Or "Pittsburgh", which may mean within the city limits or somewhere in the
general vicinity (there's a lovely term!) of the city.  Or "Walters, CA",
which I finally tracked down to a RR stop that is now underneath the Salton
Sea (California, USA)--obviously, that species of bird is no longer to be
found within 50m of *that* locality.  Or "Palestine", which may become a
valid name again, but with different borders than it had at the time this
specimen was collected.  I care about the specimens all labelled the same
because that's where the collector had his base camp, although he travelled
as much as 25 miles in every direction from there to do his collecting, so
we have several subspecies of the same species, all labelled with the same
locality.  You're worried about accuracy to within 10m?

With GPS units becoming so affordable, it's getting easy to forget that
those of us with collections >100 years old have to have a database system
that allows for both modern and ancient accuracy levels.  I *don't know* the
accuracy of locality labelling for the vast majority of our nearly 200,000
specimens, but I *do* know that it varied wildly.

Robin

Robin K Panza                         panzar at carnegiemuseums.org
Collection Manager, Section of Birds          ph:  412-622-3255
Carnegie Museum of Natural History       fax: 412-622-8837
4400 Forbes Ave.
Pittsburgh  PA  15213-4008  USA

-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Shattuck [mailto:steves at ENTO.CSIRO.AU]

 Arguably a standard set of codes could be
developed (1 = within 10m, 2 = 11-50m, etc) but given the independent nature
of taxonomists it's unlikely this would ever be agreed on never mind
accepted and implemented.