[Nhcoll-l] Lack of latitude and longitude

[Carolyn R Freiwald]

Hi,

I will second the point of estimated versus exact locations, especially as those data may find their way to large databases (GenBank, IsoBank, Neotoma, etc.).  We have some archaeological data without exact coordinates and my goal is to list collection location multiple ways without inventing coordinates.

Carolyn


________________________________
From: Nhcoll-l <nhcoll-l-bounces at mailman.yale.edu> on behalf of Dakota Rowsey <drowsey at asu.edu>
Sent: Monday, September 30, 2024 10:23 AM
To: Vanessa Pitusi <vanessa.pitusi at uit.no>; nhcoll-l at mailman.yale.edu <nhcoll-l at mailman.yale.edu>
Subject: Re: [Nhcoll-l] Lack of latitude and longitude

[EXTERNAL]

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<mailto: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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