Locality & Georeferencing Sources for Mandala

The following are the most common sources of locality and georeferencing tools that we use for Mandala. Links are available on a tab in Mandala's LOCALITY table that transport the user automatically to this discussion or the various online gazetteers.

In retrospective input of data from existing collections, it is essential to input the verbatim information from a locality label to facilitate proofing and to backcheck possible errors in interpretation of the locality data when it is parsed in LOCALITY. A complete verbatim label would include all the information that we could possibly look up at this time, including elevation, county, and latitude/longitude. The reality is that insect labels, being as minute as the insects themselves, are often far from complete. In addition, political boundaries change and often their names change as well. The information entered into LOCALITY is our current concept of where a specimen was collected, keeping in mind and in hand, the original verbatim label. We can use one of the tools below (or ones listed in the LOCALITY table of Mandala) to expand our knowledge, adding country, county, latitude, and longitude. Or if we know the collector(s), we may also know that elevation, latitude, and longitude that are printed on the label were all obtained via a GPS (global positioning satellite) device, even though it is not directly stated on the label. In such cases, we will state that the source of the data was from a GPS, over simply saying that the information was on the label. In either case, these measurements have not been cross-checked with other sources for accuracy unless errors appear glaring (e.g., specimen geocoded for the middle of the ocean or entirely different biogeographic region than others collected for that species).

The following list discusses some of the pros and cons of using one tool over another. Mandala has links to other tools that may be more country or region-specific that are not included below.

Microsoft Encarta Virtual Globe/Earth : This CD acts as an interactive world atlas but is available only for the Windows platform. Encarta will display latitude, longitude, and county names but not elevation. Place name searches return all entries that have a spelling close to that of your query, making it especially useful where information has been misspelled or is difficult to read on the label. After choosing the desired result, a map will appear with the locality in the center of the map. Zooming in can better pinpoint the lat/long information. Latitude and longitude data can either be displayed as decimals or in degrees-minutes-seconds. Also contains a measuring tool that is cumulative along irregular features such as coastlines.

U.S. Geological Survey: USGS finds the coordinates of many different features in the United States and its territories, including municipalities, rivers, canyons, woods, plains, etc. A query can contain any or all of the following entries: feature name, state name, county name, or feature type. USGS will return all results it finds in its databases with the matching descriptions. Sometimes more than one result is returned. In this case, in order to see specific details about your desired feature, you may have to click on its name (if it is highlighted in blue). The lat/long coordinates are given in a table as strings of numbers; the first set of numbers are degrees, the next two numbers are in minutes, and the last two numbers are in seconds. The correct spelling is necessary to return any pertinent information. Sometimes, in addition to lat/long information, elevation is also given in feet. If there is a displacement (i.e. 7 km N Chicago), this elevation cannot be used. Sometimes a city will have multiple lat/long listings. For example, searching for "Los Angeles" will return 19 lat/long listings because it is such a large city. For large cities such as this, users sometimes search Encarta (see above) to get a more general geocoding (i.e. not down to exact seconds).

If a query does not return any results, but specific information is known about the locality, this information can be input with a hope of returning the correct result. For example, if the label reads "Great Malt Lake, Davis County, Utah", no results are found with this query. However, if you input "Feature Type=Lake, County=Davis, and State=Utah", and compare the label with the results (2 results are returned, "Great Salt Lake" and "Farmington Lake"), you will find "Great Salt Lake" is very close to the label. These interpretations are recorded in a geocoding comments field that track assumptions made in the interpretation of labels while geocoding.

NGA (formerly NIMA) is the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency's database of international geographic feature names. It is used to find latitude and longitude information for features outside of the United States. Although the website for entering queries can be rather intimidating looking, with many windows and frames, you can input the locality name under "Query Criteria", and select the desired country below that. You can specify feature types (i.e. rivers, canals, etc.), but if you do not specify any, all areas are searched. You must specify a country or latitude/longitude area for the search. Because of this, Encarta is used when no country is specified, even though it contains fewer place names.

Australian Gazetteer. This internet site from the Australian National Mapping Agency is useful for Australian territories, giving latitude, longitude, feature type and territory information. Searches can be general (i.e. searching a name for all feature types and in all of Australia), or more specific (i.e. searching a name for a beach in Tasmania). Latitude and longitude are given in degrees, minutes, and seconds.

Geographical Names of Canada is an internet site similar to the Australian Gazetteer, except for Canada from the Canadian Permanent Committee on Geographical Names. Searches can be general (i.e. searching a name for all feature types in all of Canada), or more specific (i.e. searching a name of a lake in Ontario). After the results are returned, click on the "Details" button to obtain more detailed information. The latitude and longitude values are given in degrees, minutes, and seconds.

Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN). Getty Information Institute, Los Angeles, California is a comprehensive, international gazetteer of over 900,000 place names. Like Encarta, you can search on a single feature without a country name. It returns the continent, nation, state, county, latitude and longitude in degrees and minutes with direction. Geographic coordinates for most places represent the center of that place. For rivers or streams, the source is referenced. TGN also references the source of its information. Names also contain flags that indicate usage: C for current name; H for historical name; V for vernacular name; and O for a variant name in a language other than the vernacular. Made for studies of art history, these variations in usage can be a boon for names no longer used or whose common spellings vary.

Tiger Maps give you zoomable maps of areas in the USA. Because the maps take time to load in your browser and it can be difficult to orient yourself, this site is most useful for displacement measurements from specified target (e.g., 6 km E of Cloverly, on route 650), in particular those along a specific feature (e.g., along a road or stream). The city and state names are entered at the bottom of the webpage, and latitude and longitude values are returned in decimal format and you can click and see a map of the area. From this map, zoom in or out, and ask to see streets, highways, etc. You will need to use the compass and the scale given below the map on the site to measure the distance from a given point. We use the pinpoint of the municipality or specific area positioned by the program as our basis of the measurement. When we used Tiger Maps for geocoding displacements, we tried to have our measurement follow a major road from the area we were using as our base.

If displacement is stated as along a particular feature (stream, river, road, etc.) that is not straight or gives no indication of direction, either Tiger Maps or Encarta must be used. However if there is no indication of feature along which the measurement was made, we are assuming an "as the crow flies" displacement from a point. Here we can now use the calculator for displacement in the LOCALITY database to automatically calculate the displacement.

Many thanks to Andrea Gavurnik, Jessica Bickham, Kristin Algmin, & Amanda Buck
for their background work on our geocoding methods.