Biodiversity Information Science and Standards :
Conference Abstract
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Corresponding author: Peter D Campbell (petercampbell8@ku.edu)
Received: 23 Aug 2022 | Published: 23 Aug 2022
© 2022 Peter Campbell, Andrew Townsend Peterson
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Citation:
Campbell PD, Townsend Peterson A (2022) Interpreting and Georeferencing the Concept of “Near” in Locality Descriptors in Biodiversity Records. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 6: e93862. https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.6.93862
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The process of georeferencing is fundamentally a matter of spatial relationships: where is the point of interest in relation to the Prime Meridian, the Equator, the nearest landmark, etc. The process of adding geographic coordinates and uncertainty measurements to data coming from the work of others is often complicated by interpretation and subjectivity. Take for instance the description, “found near the city of Springfield", which might be assigned a coordinate pair based on the centroid of the city’s footprint. If the implication is that the subject was found around Springfield, then how close? Could this description refer to a point within the city? Is this description referring to the city limits, the farthest reaches of city mailing addresses, or the original author’s interpretation of the territory of Springfield? At present, best practices for adding coordinate uncertainty to such data records is to expand arbitrarily the boundaries of the feature (e.g., the city limits of Springfield), and use the distance from this new shape’s center to its farthest point (
open-source, QGIS, coordinate uncertainty, best practices, Voronoi diagram
Peter D. Campbell
TDWG 2022
NSF EPSCoR grant OIA-1920946
University of Kansas