Georeferencing

Georeferencing (putting coordinates on a collecting site description) is not a trivial task; to do it well takes time and considerable knowledge as well as ready resources. It's easy to make a variety of mistakes. Awareness of geography (biogeography as well as political geography), botanical collecting history, collector's protocol, as well as of the numerous possibilities of data error will help the process immensely. The tools on this page will allow you to map coordinates (1), to get coordinates for a place name and position them on a map (2), to map all Consortium records for a county (3), to select an area and retrieve all the Consortium records (or a list of taxa) (4), and identify possible bad Consortium records (5).

  1. Map Coordinates (click to link to a form)

    Often it's useful to map a set of coordinates to see if they show up where they are supposed to.
    This tool allows you to paste coordinates into a form and then map them with BerkeleyMapper.

  2. Look up and map locations using GeoLocate

  3. Get coordinates from Google Maps: Itouch maps

  4. Store and share geographic insights: WikiMapia

  5. Map records of all specimens with coordinate data for a county. Select source and county

    Source (1 or more; default is all sources) County (required)

    If you want only the possibly dubious records ...

  6. Retrieve all georeferenced records from a specified area

    Note: Not all counties have been uniformly georeferenced!
    The area can be represented either by providing the corner coordinates of a rectangle (fill out #1 below)
    or
    by drawing a circle in BerkeleyMapper and pasting the circle information into the field at #2.
    1. Provide bounding box coordinates, retrieve records inside the box
      Use decimal coordinates (e.g.: 33.4, -122.6). Limit the maximum box side length to 2 degrees.
      Northern latitude Southern latitude Western longitude Eastern longitude
    2. OR paste in coordinates and error radius using the circle-drawing tool at the top of the map in BerkeleyMapper (click to get map).
      Example of information to be copied from tool and pasted into form:
    Coordinate: 37.87654 / -121.93076 (3077 meters radius)

    If you only want a list of names, not all the records: Taxon List

  7. Retrieve records with possible out-of-state coordinates

  8. Data cleanup (possible errors in georeferencing as well as data entry errors)

  9. Links