Papers and Posters

Abstract

A New Computing Tool for Automated Georeferencing of Natural History Collection Data
Rios, Nelson & Bart, Henry L. Jr., Tulane University Museum of Natural History, Building A-3 Wild Boar Rd., Belle Chasse, LA 70037, U.S.A. nelson@museum.tulane.edu

It is estimated that the number of biological specimens in museums and herbaria worldwide exceeds 2.5 billion. Revived interest in these collections and biodiversity informatics has brought about many efforts to digitize museum records. Sadly, geographic coordinates are not available for the vast majority of these records. Thus, our ability to utilize this vast information resource in large-scale spatial studies is limited. Traditional methods for georeferencing collection data from text descriptions are tedious and time consuming, typically involving finding the locality on either a hardcopy or digital maps, plotting the locality, and determining the coordinates. This process can be very time consuming, even with digital maps.

In 2002, with funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation, we began work on a computing solution to this task. The end result is GEOLocate, a software tool that interprets textual descriptions of locality information into geographic coordinates for North America, projects these coordinates onto digital maps, provides an efficient mechanism to correct the displayed locality information, supports external data input and batch processing, and provides built-in auto updating capabilities over the web.