Georeferencing best practices. Version 1.0.

Abstract

Georeferencing Best Practices provides guidelines to the best practices for georeferencing. Though targeted specifically at biological occurrence data, the concepts and methods presented here may be just as useful in other disciplines. This publication provides guidelines to the best practice for georeferencing. Though it is targeted specifically at biological occurrence data, the concepts and methods presented here can be applied in other disciplines where spatial interpretation of location is of interest. This document builds on the original Guide to Best Practices for Georeferencing (Chapman & Wieczorek 2006), which was one of the outputs from the BioGeomancer project (Guralnick et al. 2006). Several earlier projects and organizations (e.g. MaNIS, MaPSTeDI, INRAM, GEOLocate, NatureServe, CRIA, ERIN, CONABIO) had previously developed guidelines and tools for georeferencing, and these provided a good starting point for such a document. A detailed history of the organizations involved in the development of BioGeomancer and of the original Guide was given in that source. Throughout this document we reference tools and methodologies developed by those organizations and we acknowledge the valuable work by those organizations in their development. This document attempts to bring best practices up to date with terms, technologies, and georeferencing recommendations that have been developed and refined since the original document was published.