Specimens, subspecies, and GPS

[Kenelm Philip]

	Actually, you don't necessarily have to have a GPS in order to know
your lat/long coordinates. I was scaling those off USGS quads for years
before I acquired a GPS unit. And, since the elevations provided by GPS
are essentially worthless, you would normally use the quad to find your
elevation (simple when you know the coords), unless you carry an altimeter
_and_ keep it calibrated.

	Regarding the instability of place names--that applies mainly to
small towns, which do sometimes vanish. Landscape features (mountains,
rivers, lakes) tend to be fairly stable over time (except in these PC days
when some names are being changed because they are perceived as objection-
able).

	There is, by the way, another reason why the use of lat/long coords
is becoming useful. There are now a number of mapping programs (including
my own 'RangeMapper') which can rapidly plot _large_ numbers of collection
sites on outline maps--but they require some kind of numerical coordinates
for the sites, and lat/long is one of the standards.

							Ken Philip
fnkwp at uaf.edu