geographical coordinates and accuracy

[Robin Leech]

There is another problem not touched on so far, and that is that late in the
1800s and early 1900s, collectors were all over a particular state, say
California, and many other western states in the western U.S.  The
collectors sent their material to a person in Los Angeles.  When the
material went to a museum, the locality data read "Los Angeles, Cal.".  The
specimens could have come from anywhere in the western U.S.
Robin Leech
----- Original Message -----
From: "Panza, Robin" <PanzaR at CARNEGIEMUSEUMS.ORG>
To: <TAXACOM at USOBI.ORG>
Sent: Tuesday, February 13, 2001 7:55 AM
Subject: Re: geographical coordinates and accuracy


> 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.
>