A Georeferencing Tool to Improve Biodiversity Data Quality

Languages: English | Portuguese.
Authors: Allan Koch Veiga, Antonio Mauro Saraiva, Etienne Américo Cartolano Júnior.

Published in the Proceeedings of TDWG 2010 Annual Conference.

BDD Biodiversity Georeferencing Tool.

Data Quality plays an important role in the field of Biodiversity Informatics. Low-quality data can negatively impact models and analyses used to support strategic decisions aimed at biodiversity conservation and sustainable use.

In the context of biodiversity data quality, geospatial data are of great importance. They refer to the geospatial location of occurrences, which are characterized by observations or specimen collections in the field and can be utilized, for example, to create distribution models and density maps.

Due to the relevance of geospatial data in Biodiversity Informatics, the development of policies, methods and tools to improve quality in the digitization of geospatial data is of utmost importance. Keeping this necessity in mind, the Biodiversity Data Digitizer (BDD) tool [1] utilizes a georeferencing resource to aid in the digitization of geospatial data focusing on quality.

This web-based resource, referred to as the Biodiversity Georeferencing Tool (BGT), allows the user, by means of an interactive three-dimensional map based on the Google Earth API [2] – Application Programming Interface – to obtain the name of the country, state and city as well as the latitude, longitude and altitude of a location by clicking on its position on the map. The BGT allows the improvement of geospatial data quality in at least three aspects: completeness, accuracy and consistency.