[Nhcoll-l] Google Earth fix?

[Douglas Yanega]

On 1/6/22 11:03 AM, Marie Angel wrote:
> Hi,
>
> In Geolocate’s collaborative georeferencing web client 
> (https://www.geo-locate.org/web/WebComGeoref.aspx), if you click on 
> the small blue and white plus sign on the right side, it will show 
> different base layers and overlays. Under “overlays” there is an 
> option to show US counties.
>
> I hope this helps!

Hi, Marie.

Now that you point out where this feature is, it's good to see that they 
have it. However, what would help here is if GeoLocate had a more 
user-friendly interface. I can't see how you and other using GL can deal 
with specimen label data capture without introducing unnecessary 
uncertainty.

Consider this specimen label:

17 mi W Carrizozo, Lincoln Co., NM

Unless I'm missing something, GeoLocate does not have a tool to create a 
path that measures *exactly 17 road miles* W of Carrizozo. Google Earth 
does. It turns out, in fact, using Google Earth with the county lines 
layer restored, that this locality label is wrong, because if you drive 
17 miles west from Carrizozo (there's only one road, and it goes mostly 
NW), you cross the county line into Socorro county at around 13 miles. I 
don't see a way to tell in GL how far that county line is from 
Carrizozo, the way you can using Google Earth.

When I was researching georeferencing protocols for legacy specimens 
(anything without lat/long data on the label) for a major NSF grant, I 
did numerous side-by-side comparisons of various available tools, and 
while GeoLocate gave very rapid answers, it always underperformed in 
terms of accuracy, with a much higher error rate and uncertainty radius 
compared to manual lookups using Google Earth. Points generated using GL 
would often be several miles away from the actual location, so what one 
saved in time (admittedly substantial) was undermined by a very 
significant loss of accuracy. I can give very concrete examples, for 
anyone interested in nitpicky details.

Thanks,

-- 
Doug Yanega      Dept. of Entomology       Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314     skype: dyanega
phone: (951) 827-4315 (disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
              https://faculty.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html
   "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
         is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82
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