[Taxacom] Guide to Best Practices for Georeferencing

[taxacom2 at achapman.org]

A couple of weeks ago, I sent the following message to announce the release of the Guide to Best Practices for Georeferencing.  Unfortunately, the link to the publication went down shortly afterwards while the ISBN number was being added.  I apologise to any who may have been inconvenienced.  The link is now working.

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A Guide to Best Practices for Georeferencing has just been published on the GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility) website.  It can be downloaded from

http://www.gbif.org/prog/digit/Georeferencing

This publication is one of the outputs from the BioGeomancer project and discusses Best Practices for Georeferencing biological species (specimen and observational) data. The publication presents examples of how to georeference a wide range of different location types, and provides information and examples on how to determine the extent and maximum uncertainty distance for locations based on the information provided. 

A number of projects have been working for many years on the development of guidelines and tools for improving the georeferencing of primary biodiversity data. This document largely draws on those initiatives and attempts to bring the results of all this previous work into one comprehensive best practices document.  It also draws upon new technologies and ideas developed through the current BioGeomancer project and existing projects such as MaNIS, HerpNet, MaPSTeDI, GEOLocate, INRAM, CRIA, ERIN and BioGeoMancer Classic.

It is hoped that collections institutions, museums, herbaria and others, will adopt these guidelines to achieve consistency across the world in how locality data are georeferenced and documented, especially with regard to the recording of uncertainty.

Arthur D. Chapman
Toowoomba, Australia