[Nhcoll-l] Google Earth fix?

[Mare Nazaire]

As I understand it, GeoLocate does have a measuring tool to measure road
miles. I never just use one georeferencing program - I use GeoLocate and
Google Earth together and make sure that I am getting consistent results,
because you can run into discrepancies, as you have pointed out.

~Mare

On Thu, Jan 6, 2022 at 11:43 AM Douglas Yanega <dyanega at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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-- 
Mare Nazaire, Ph.D.
Administrative Curator, Herbarium [RSA-POM]
California Botanic Garden
Research Assistant Professor, Claremont Graduate University
1500 North College Avenue
Claremont, California 91711
909.625.8767 ext. 268
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