Quality issues in georeferencing: From physical collections to digital data repositories for ecological research

Abstract

Natural history collections constitute an enormous wealth of information of Life on Earth. It is estimated that over 2 billion specimens are preserved at institutions worldwide, of which less than 10% are accessible via biodiversity data aggregators such as GBIF. Moreover, they are a very important resource for eco‐evolutionary research, which greatly depends on knowing the precise location where the specimens were collected in order to characterize the environment in which they lived. Yet, only about 55% of the accessible records are georeferenced and only 31% have coordinate uncertainty information, which is critical for conducting rigorous studies. The awareness of this gap of knowledge which hinders the enormous potential of such data in research led to the organization of a workshop which brought together key players in georeferencing of natural history collections. The discussion and outcomes of this workshop are here presented.

Uncertainty matters: ascertaining where specimens in natural history collections come from and its implications for predicting species distributions

“…Clear and detailed guidelines for quality georeferencing have long existed (Chapman and Wieczorek 2006, 2020). However, our exploration clearly shows that GBIF‐mediated data are clearly not on a par with them, as shown recently (Marcer et al 2021a, b). Specimens with coordinates and with both coordinates and uncertainty are not evenly spread across the world.…”

“…A back‐of‐the‐envelope calculation with these rates would mean somewhere between five months and more than three years to georeference one million specimens with a team of 10 georeferencers, depending on the degree of reuse of already georeferenced sites (Supporting information). This gives an idea of the huge task ahead to fully georeference the world's billions of preserved specimens (Ariño 2010, Marcer et al 2021a). In addition, the disquieting situation of the current state of georeferences in the existing global digital dataset does not make things any better.…”

A perspective on biodiversity data and applications for spatio-temporally robust spatial planning for area-based conservation

“…The choice of the data resolution is a classic issue in conservation science that has been discussed in two separate contexts, i.e., mathematical suboptimality and cost-efficiency issues resulting from spatial biases [33,34], and spatial aggregation of conservation areas to improve long-term conservation efficacy [35]. Biodiversity data are spatially, temporally, and taxonomically biased [36][37][38][39] due to shortages of survey efforts [40] and a lack of mobilization of potentially usable information, including undigitized records [37,41]. Such incomplete and biased information can degrade the performance of conservation planning [42].…”

Brazilian Flora 2020: Leveraging the power of a collaborative scientific network

“…Despite the colossal amount of taxonomic and distributional data made available digitally (DAI) over the past few decades, details of fewer than 10% of the world's 2 billion preserved specimens are available via data aggegators such as Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) using the Darwin Core Archive format (DwC‐A) (Marcer & al., 2020). Furthermore, only about 55% of these occurrence records have coordinates; of these, barely a third (31%) include information about the uncertainty of the coordinates that is so essential for rigorous spatial analyses.…”

“…The same occurs in other herbaria, such as URM. Given that retrospective georeferencing of collections is recognized as a skilled and time‐consuming process that is difficult to automate (Marcer & al., 2020), georeferencing should be mandatory for all collections. Nonetheless, the potential to increase the utility of existing biodiversity data makes retrospective georeferencing worth pursuing (Hill & al., 2009).…”