Determining Space from Place for Natural History Collections In a Distributed Digital Library Environment

Abstract

More than a billion biological specimens have been collected, preserved, and deposited in the permanent collections of museums and herbaria around the world. These specimens are the foundation of our knowledge about biological diversity, past and present. Researchers in biodiversity informatics are engaged in providing digital access to the basic biodiversity data associated with specimens, as well as new software tools and services that will create novel research opportunities for ecological analysis, predictive modeling, and synthesis. Greater access to structured biodiversity information also directly benefits applied areas of conservation and resource management. Digitizing the data associated with a billion specimens is an enormous task, and much of it still lies before us. Already, however, tens of millions of specimen records have been captured in collection management systems that represent a solid foundation for comprehensive digital libraries in the museum community. Of the various classes of information linked to biological specimens, geospatial coordinates used for mapping species distributions are among the most widely demanded by the scientific community and the general public. Providing these coordinates (geospatial referencing) has proven a significant challenge. Nearly every specimen is associated with a georeference, most often a textual representation of the place from whence it came, but few carry with them quantitative geospatial coordinates. We address here advances made in the task of geospatial referencing for biological collections.