Georeferencing

Much of the legacy locality description data for biological collections in genebanks, herbaria and museums lack coordinates, which makes it difficult to use them in geographic analysis. Here we document some of our procedures for georeferencing textual locality descriptions. In our case we do this for collecting sites of crop varieties and crop wild relatives.

We use the Biogeomancer software for semi-automated geoparsing and georeferencing. Geoparsing refers to the conversion of textual descriptions of places where data and specimens were collected (locality descriptions such as “1 km N of Calamba, Laguna, Philippines") into a number of corresponding semantical parts (E.g.: "place name = "Calamba"; Offset = "1 km"; Direction = "N", AdminDivision = "Laguna", Country = "Philippines").

Software: Biogeomancer

Biogeomancer is a web application that can be used for semi-automated georeferencing of large (and small) datasets semi-automatically. The picture below shows how the software works.

The following image is an example of the output Biogeomancer produces. It indicates the most likely point and a circle around it that indicates the uncertainty (a method documented here)

Biogeomancer has a help page.

After registering for an account, you can submit files containing many records (batch georeferencing). There are specific guidelines for the preparation of the files to be submitted.

There is also a list of the types of locality descriptions that Geomancer does and does not understand.

Georeferencing guidelines

There is a Guide to Best Practices for Georeferencing (also here).

Specific guidelines developed at the Geography Laboratory of IRRI can be found here.

Classic locality descriptions

Here is a small collection of remarkable locality descriptions

"Collected in El Corte Ingles supermercado in Madrid Spain"

"Mr. Merryweather saw tree in Mr. Bramley's garden" There is quite a story behind this description! http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~brailsford/stories/bramley.htm

"Nuts given by Suleiman Khan at U.S. Embassy - said to be from Dir."

"West of Western Union, east of cemetary in crop field edge, Fayette County."

"14 hours by mule from Castellanos"

"garden of the Shah, Mashhad. Khaghani"