[Nhcoll-l] Lack of latitude and longitude
Dakota Rowsey
drowsey at asu.edu
Mon Sep 30 11:23:01 EDT 2024
Dear Vanessa,
Just a word of caution to the approach that Vijay highlights - doing so
inflates the perceived confidence in the provenance of the specimen, and
may mislead users, especially for projects that require fine spatial
resolution, due to the risks of providing misleading coordinates. There
have been projects I have worked on where I have had to remove nearly half
of the records obtained from collections databases because, while they had
point coordinates, the locality information was sufficiently vague to where
I couldn't be confident that the lat/long provided wasn't just the result
of a geo-locate search of a large landmark (in other words, dropping the
pin in the center of an administrative area).
I am of the opinion that assigning a point locality in the absence of
specific locality information veers awfully close to presenting incorrect
information on the occurrence record, and I am of the philosophy that an
incomplete or necessarily vague record is better than a misleading one. But
these are all gray areas, of course, and the approach Vijay highlights is
pretty common, in my experience.
Dakota
On Fri, Sep 27, 2024 at 4:35 AM Vanessa Pitusi <vanessa.pitusi at uit.no>
wrote:
> Hi,
>
>
>
> I am in contact with a veterinarian researcher who might deposit parasites
> at our museum.
>
>
>
> Obviously, we prefer to register all specimens with a latitude and
> longitude of where they were collected. However, she said that will be
> difficult as they get specimens from reindeer herders and, thus, only have
> the administrative area/municipality as a reference.
>
>
>
> Has anyone had a similar issue and found a good way to deal with this? Or
> is it a case of “It is what it is”?
>
>
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Vanessa
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