BioGeomancer

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Contents 1 Overview 2 Georeferencing 2.1 Definition 2.2 Use 2.3 Steps 3 Software 4 Historical Context 5 Motivation 6 Impact 7 Participants

[edit] Overview

The BioGeomancer Project is a worldwide collaboration of natural history and geospatial data experts. The primary goal of the project is to maximize the quality and quantity of biodiversity data that can be mapped in support of scientific research, planning, conservation, and management. The project promotes discussion, manages geospatial data and data standards, and develops software tools in support of this mission.

[edit] Georeferencing

[edit] Definition

Georeferencing is the process of converting text descriptions of locations to computer-readable geographic locations, such as a GIS system uses. Although this can be done by hand with maps and some guesswork, the BioGeomancer project provides the tools to improve the results for organizations with lots of data to georeference by automating the georeferencing of bulk data, learning from existing georeferences, accessing map and placename gazetteers, generating the computer-readable geographic locations and error descriptions according to accepted standards, and providing tools for validating these.

[edit] Use

With standards-based georeferenced locations, your data can be contributed to mapping and geographic search applications, such as through the DiGIR portals. These applications allow users to use map-based interfaces to review, query, and otherwise interact with your data, either alone or in combination with data from other sources. (See References » Uses of Georeferenced Primary Species Data)

[edit] Steps

Georeferencing involves three stages: generating location coordinates, calculating the error, and validation. Conducting georeferencing at your institution or project may involve additional stages, such as preparing data fields, expanding data tables to receive BioGeomancer's result output, and training in interpreting the georeferencing results at each stage.

[edit] Software

The BioGeomancer consortium is developing online workbench, web services, and desktop applications that will provide georeferencing for collectors, curators and users of natural history specimens, including software tools to allow natural language processing of archival data records that were collected in many different formats. Try out the BioGeomancer workbench: BioGeomancer Single Georeference Workbench

[edit] Historical Context

Over the past 250 years, biologists have gone into the field to collect specimens and associated environmental information documenting the range of life. The results of these explorations are an irreplaceable archive of Earth's biological diversity that plays a fundamental role in generating new knowledge and guiding conservation decisions. Yet, roughly one billion specimen records, and even more species observation records, remain practically unusable in their current form.

[edit] Motivation

Georeferenced biocollection data is in high demand. Mapping species occurrence data is fundamental to describing and analysing biotic distributions. This information is also critical for conservation planning, reserving selection, monitoring, and the examination of the potential effects of climate change on biodiversity. Increasing the availability of georeferenced species distribution data will vastly increase our ability to understand patterns of biodiversity and to make balanced conservation-related decisions. Most data in these analyses come from natural history collections, which provide unique and irreplaceable information, especially for areas that have undergone habitat change due to clearing for agriculture or ubanization.

[edit] Impact

We expect that BioGeomancer will have an immediate positive impact on the availability of data from natural history collections. BioGeomancer will bring the cost to value ratio down to the point where every collection that seeks to make its data public will also seek to georefernce those records. For example, for the ORNIS project, the existence of BioGeomancer will make the difference between being able to georeference only North American localities and being able to georeference all of the localities of bird specimen from 30 participating institutions during the course of the project. On the global scale, BioGeomancer will have an impact on standards development within GBIF and the Taxonomic Database Working Group, and the tools developed here are explicitly targeted for interoperability with the GBIF portal.

[edit] Participants

The BioGeomancer research consortium is coordinated by the University of California at Berkeley and is developing a universal system for geo-referencing the diverse specimen records in natural history collections.